Handling Parallel I/O Operations
UCBs were introduced in the 1960s with OS/360. Then a device addressed by UCB was typically a moving head hard disk drive or a tape drive, with no internal cache. Without it, the device was usually grossly outperformed by the mainframe's channel processor. Hence, there was no reason to execute multiple input/output operations at the same time, as these would be impossible for a device to physically handle. In 1968 IBM introduced the 2305-1 and 2305-2 fixed-head disks, which had 8 exposures (alias addresses) per disk, and the OS/360 support provided a UCB per exposure in order to permit multiple concurrent channel programs.
Read more about this topic: Unit Control Block
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