If you are not familiar with the systems at the time, this was a major leap forward in both user experience and productivity. For large IBM mainframes, development was still mostly punch card based using batch systems (both DOS/VS and OS/VS2). It could take a day to get a turn around for a compile. With VM, every programmer had their own computer, with an editor and file system to edit, store, and compile programs. It also allowed a single mainframe to run multiple copies of the DOS and/or MVS. If you want to try this system out for yourself, it is all in the public domain. Look up the Hercules emulator and the VM SixPack and MVS 3.8. You can relive the golden age of DP.

She used the term 'abend' to mean the program crashed. That's proper old school!

My first user of VM/CMS was in 1978 on a 135 (aged 18), and I was responsible for installing and maintaining DOS/VS and some application programming, JCL and CMS scripting. I also designed and wrote a MAKE-type utility to do incremental compilation and linking. This was 45-46 years ago, and this video has brought back a heap of memories.

Didn't expect to hear about virtual machines and switching operating systems back in the 70s. Interesting!

Wow, mind=blown. Around 10 years after this, I interned/temped at the IBM Cambridge Scientific Center and at the time both Love Seawright and Dick MacKinnon worked there. Both were high-up execs then and we didn't see much of them day-to-day. Good old VM and CMS, I must have "IPL CMS"d about a bazillion times in my short time @IBM. By the mid-80s Rexx had gotten really popular so a lot of scripts were written in that language but there were plenty of EXEC scripts around still. We also had the internal VNET network with email, file transfer, mailing-lists (maybe forums too) - very "internet-like" long before the internet. Gotta figure out how to get "ABEND" into my coding vocabulary again, had completely forgotten the term.

Ah, that brings back memories! I only ever worked on VM/CMS, programming in FORTRAN and Rexx. Those 3270 terminals were literally bulletproof!

I can’t believe that I worked on this platform and thought it was wonderful.

I love the clicking sound of the keyboard.

Is it just me, or is there something alluring about 70's women talking about VMs pwoooooaar!

Incredible how a large bank had their entire operation running on 1.5 megabytes of memory, partitioned to 800KB and 700KB. Nowadays, a child’s piggy bank toy has more memory than that.

Brings back memories. We used it as a way to provide a backup for smaller plant systems in case of extended outages. It was a dog, even on a one meg 168, but it did work as designed albeit more slowly. We never embraced CMS for development due to capacity limitations. Remember, in 1975 a meg of memory cost $50,000!

Now this is retrocomputing content. Showing computing professionals of the era (something archetypally nerdy about them) actually using the hardware and software to get something done. One thing not mentioned here because everybody interested in this video in 1975 would've known it anyway: the terminals were not like modern Unix terminals like xterm and so forth, which emulate DEC VT100 and above terminals, which presented themselves as just a grid of character cells on the end of a serial line. They had their own proprietary high-speed data connection, and a protocol that was closer to submitting web forms. Though you couldn't see them, there were fields in which you entered data which the terminal retained, and then when you hit enter the terminal would send the data entered as records back to the mainframe, which would then send commands back to update the display. So when Love is entering commands, there's a field at the bottom of the screen that accepts her command, and when she hits enter, only then does the command get sent to the mainframe. This allows for less interactive displays -- only Enter/Send and the F keys send interrupts to the program running on the mainframe -- but it was perfect for conserving the bandwidth and involving the CPU as little as possible, allowing the mainframe to support many, many more terminals than it otherwise could have. You can style your modern Linux, Mac, or even Windows terminal to look like the venerable 3270 with Ricardo Bánffy's TrueType 3270 font: github.com/rbanffy/3270font

The algorithm liked this video today for some reason

The only mainframe training material to ever escape IBM

This takes me back. I was a systems programmer specialising in VM/CMS, CMS and systems written in REXX. Later, I got to use Z/VM on our machine used for client recovery systems testing. I also could handle the other two operating systems, VSE and OS/VS, formerly MVS. CICS too.

Love Seawright is mentioned in Melinda Varian’s VM and the VM Community. She did much to promote the use of VM/CMS Love retired from IBM decades ago.

Back when computing was new, exciting, and fun. I had a VM related startup and had our own 370/158 and peripherals to start. We hadn’t the foggiest idea of what we were doing business wise but sold great software sone of which is still in use today.

Fascinating! As UNIX guy, you can see clear precedents to the interactive shells that were around the corner.

The neatest thing I ever did was to get the University of Toronto's Operating system called Turing to boot on its own VM and run an interactive terminal that we then used to compile a C program and produce results on a virtual printer. and each of the six student teams was able to do that simultaneously. Back then we were pushing that mainframe pretty hard. I think the System Operator in the data center showed us our usage on the console as 95% of its memory and processor capacity when we all hit compile at the same time! It would be another 25 years before I could replicate that on a desktop with 4Gb or RAM and 16TB of hard drive under ProxMox.

Great memories, started off in 1982 using VM/CMS and CP to develop and debug code written in C that was deployed to our customers running DOS/VSE and MVS, we developed a common 'C Runtime' for these platforms, before IBM came out with a usable C environment for the MF. Had to look at compiler/assembler listings to know where to put an 'adstop' to break at a particular C statement. IPCS eventually made that a bit easier, but I was glad to finally move onto Unix and PCs.

Great memories. I used vm/370 extensively the early 1980s. Thanks for sharing this

Took a few minutes to remember that IPL stands for Initial Program Load. Good Times :)

I used VM/370 in early 1980's to convert and test programs from DOS/360 to DOS/VSE.

I have no clue about any of this stuff or what it was used for, but It's so weird seeing people from 1975 using terms like "Virtual Machine" and "logon." You can hear their buckling spring keyboards clicking away (Model "M" style).

The State Street guy had the best Boston accent Ive heard in a very long time (and I work in Boston!)

I feel lucky to have used VAX/VMS on 11/750, 11/780 and then MicroVax 2000. Happy Days. Everything was so organised and well thought out. I view 'modern' JS practices as sheer luck.

All green and ALL CAPS, those were the good old days !

Wonderful operating system that I used and managed as system admin on IBM 4341, 4381 and 3090 machines.

I have used vm since 1974 and while working at Amdahl I supported and developed VM/PE that was a hypervisor allowing MVS and VM to share equally the hardware … ibm was a licensee of VM/PE in Rockville MD data center… apparently benchmarking against PRISM … VM/PE major advantage was we supported device level device assignments whereas Prism was channel level dedication… also if either os failed, then the other os can restart the failed os… a started task on MVS would reIPL vm … VM/PE was supported on all pre-XA oses, vm370 to vm/sp, SVS and MVS to MVS/sp …

Fortran 4! I had to learn that language (my second, after RPN) at the behest of my astrophysics instructor, who, with no regard to our "feelings", gave the class an assignment due at the end of the week which required using the mainframe (a Fourier analysis of binary star luminosity data), though not a single one of us knew Fortran, or had used the University computer yet. We walked over to the Computer Science Department, where I had a girlfriend, and found a kind soul who taught us Fortran in about 30 minutes. Do or die! The assignment was completed properly on time, and soon we were colliding galaxies!

Never worked on these. This Cobol editing and debugging session wasn't bad experience at all I see, must've been pretty incredible back in 1975

Wow! Isn’t it crazy how some of the syntax still used today was probably established arbitrarily by these early developers? “What should we use to grab all instances?” “How about **?” 💯

this is so cool! pretty close to modern command line based software development (though less streamlined). i laughed so hard when sherry messaged the machine operator to attach a physical scratch tape to her virtual machine 😂

I did this so many times. she did a great job showing how vm works. In fact I ran multiple versions of DOS under VM.

I grew up with this! I understood it all. I am currently working on a z/OS w/ IDz and ISPF/PDF both developer interfaces for COBOL 6.2 CA-Endevor PROCGRP driven. Yet I was just asked to help a new client still running CMS on a green screen 3270 emulator no GUI app; probably still COBOL II? If you didn't get all that let's just say, this is where the baby boomers that grew to be dinosaurs once roamed. EOB/EOF

Life before ergonomics! That said, this is fascinating material. It was likely equipment similar to this that likely got me hooked into IT back in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.

Cms took a major leap forward when it added full screen editing Xedit and other upgrades

Amezing and forward thinking,who ever knows wich programs for wich systems were ever made on those systems,just mind blowing how those womans did understood the functions of those programs pretty well.

Intriguing how freely the term "Virtual Machine" was used back then, as it is today.

I was using IBM mainframe CMS up until around mid-1990s when we transitioned to Sun Unix workstations. Much better than TSO

The seemingly clear seperation they are making between "maintenance programming" and "new application development" is very fascinating. In what way are the two so clearly separated that they have their own productivity increase percentage?

Wow, programmers that actually knew what they were doing. Unlike most programmers today that just hack together some shit from stack overflow posts.

This is awesome!

I started with VM/370 at VaTech in 1975 … and have been a sysprog on it since 1977 … including developing at Amdahl for VM/PE which was a hypervisor that enabled MVS to run native with VM … all the VM370 R6 code is available with the Hercules software emulator… with several enhancements

We were a tougher, stronger nation in the 1970's - those IBM 3270 Display Terminals weighed literally about 65 pounds.

REXX and VM/CMS. Good times.

2024: "Ha! Every kid has more computer power in his pocket today." 1975: "In the year 2000 we will have human like AI, Robots and bases on Moon and Mars."

I would have liked to sit down with Love Seawright and talk about computer stuff.

Oh my god. APL. Superb language

Look up the Z390 emulator (formerly PC 370) by Donald Higgins and the book Mainframe Assembler Programming by Bill Qualls (free online at his eponymous website). Use the excellent book in an undergrad computer science course and it is one of my favorite computer books of all time, up there in clarity and examples with K&R's C Programming Language and The Rust Programming language books. This video really is a look at the 'good old days' when promotional materials were filmed by actual people involved rather than paid talking heads. Really interesting, thanks for posting.

I always wanted to work on these legacy systems.

IBM revolutionized the computing industry in 1975 with password masking

I'd love to see those women's grandchildren or great-grandchildren's reaction to this 50 year old film.

Wrote cms programs back in the 80's.

back when we were supposed to get excited about a line editor

Amazing that in only 5 short years, MS-DOS-based PC's would be in households around the globe. Though not presented to the user's command-line shell, MS-DOS *was* capable supporting multi-tasking - just without any memory protection between the tasks.

I wonder how many German-speaking IBM COBOL developers must have chuckled at having an evening in their code.

1:10 ooo he goes all leisurely here by putting is hand in his pocket for like half a second.

In 1989 I was employed in a company designing and engineering industrial systems using Unix machines, and one of the super geniuses involved told the newly employed me everyone knowing how to search in a Unix machine was an expert, and I was so impressed, shortly after a young guy was employed, and he was also this computer expert, only with PC's, he become a part of the Unix team, and one day he (accidentally?) disconnected the keyboard destroying the unix machine, after that he hated unix and used any opportunity to tell everyone

When I started working with this: CMS had been largely replaced by TSO but I did play with CMS.

I've written conservatively 30,000 lines of code in my life for all sorts of applications and data management tasks, and 10 minutes into this video I am 98% unclear on what the hell IBM Data Centers and VMs were doing in 1975 and whatever the hell they are doing here. The 70s and 80s tech industry predates me by a long time.

"When you talk about the sales numbers, Vim, just relax ..."

oh, the command «file» to file the file. Save sound a lot more dramatic, but im glad that confusion is gone nevertheless

Where are they now?

Kraftwerk's We Are The Robots song had to be a reference to this video.

Sherry Scott would be in her early 80's by now

This is in 1975. When did full screen terminals with XEDIT come into use?

The old days. 🙂

@2:11 Virtualization in 1975!

Are you the keymaster?

3:28 the woman pretending to type! :D

Cut my teeth on CP/CMS on a 360/67. It was fairly awesome for its day.

So powerful it used NIMBERs instead of NUMBERS

This is why Unix, later superseded by Linux, became the one true operating system.

are you the Key Master?

I think VM was more of what we would call multi-tasking runtime and OS that ran in them was shell with batch capabilities...

Wow! The stone age in colour! 😀

Is it just me or does everyone's speech and body language look like it was programmed in Cobol? Was robotic script reading and body language a general IBM employment requirement in 1975 or was that specific to actors in this video?

This is some portal level stuff. Also why is youtube recommended old vhs stuff for me?

looking for the 'most replayed' section of this video

5:15 two character password! :)

Saved 6 figures by spending 60k on this. Wow.

All that computing power and analysis but he couldnt work through the algorithm of doing your tie properly prior to the major presentation that will still be getting watched 50 years later

I am surprised to see so many women in a deeply technical video from this time. I always thought that they were expected to be stay-at-home wives at this time.

Wow. AI already existed in 1975.

30:43 "General Boy"

Not a very IBMish necktie...

After much consideration, I think we are going to pass. I am finding my cell phone is able to do everything your system does and it has a much slicker interface.

Just feed in the program via punchcards! lol 🤣🤣🤣🤣

VM/370, VM/XA's poor cousin.

VMs?? Not on K8S yet??

Post-modern

Only two minutes in, and the acronyms have already used up all the consonants in the alphabet! Modern infomercials will not even mention a single one..

The bad ergonomics has not aged well.

The woman sound like early AI!

Sherry kind of hot tho.

wow, what type of battery POWERED that lady's yellow outfit??? LMAO!

Where's the mouse? 😂

Always blame the Ops!😁

3:32 - spaces easily wins over tabs :-)