Project Goals
CP-40 was a one-off research system. Its declared goals were:
- Provide research input to the System/360 Model 67 team working in Poughkeepsie, who were breaking new ground with the as-yet-unproven concept of virtual memory.
- Support CSC's time-sharing requirements in Cambridge.
However, there was also an important unofficial mission: To demonstrate IBM's commitment to and capability for supporting time-sharing users like MIT. CP-40 (and its successor) achieved its goals from technical and social standpoints – they helped to prove the viability of virtual machines, to establish a culture of time-sharing users, and to launch a remote computer services industry. However, the project became embroiled in an internal IBM political war over time-sharing versus batch processing; and it failed to win the hearts and minds of the academic computer science community, which ultimately turned away from IBM to systems like Multics, UNIX, TOPS-20, and various DEC operating systems. Ultimately, however, the virtualization concepts developed in the CP-40 project bore fruit in diverse areas, and remain important today.
Read more about this topic: IBM CP-40
Famous quotes containing the words project and/or goals:
“In 1869 he started his work for temperance instigated by three drunken men who came to his home with a paper signed by a saloonkeeper and his patrons on which was written “For God’s sake organize a temperance society.””
—Federal Writers’ Project Of The Wor, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be. The question is not what we can do now for the hypothetical Mexican, the hypothetical Negro. The question is what we really want out of life, for ourselves, what we think is real.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)