The Early Years of WVNET

1975

March 4, 1975

The West Virginia Network for Educational Telecomputing (WVNET) was created by the Board of Regents. Its mission was to make computer resources available to all state institutions of higher learning. This was to be accomplished by providing central processing capacity at the WVU computing center and by installing minicomputers on each institutional campus.

This Was IT A WVNET employee is feeding cards into the IBM 2540 card punch/reader in the foreground. Towards the rear, another employee is shown before the front panel of the IBM 360/75. She is typing on a printing terminal, which is known as the Operator Console. To the left of the panel is a bank of IBM 2314 disk drives.

May 1975

Due to growth in the amount of computer usage by each user and in the number of users, WVNET was experiencing a crisis in demands for online storage. WVNET purchased IBM 3330 Model II DASD. These storage devices had been designed by IBM to run on their 370 computers and could not be used on a 360/75. WVNET simply did not have the money to upgrade its 360/75 to a 370, but needed the new larger DASD desperately. The systems staff felt that, with some operating system modifications and some modifications to the microcode in the 3330's control unit, WVNET would be able to make use of these new devices. WVNET was the first computer center in the world to successfully use IBM 3330 DASD Model II's on a 360 computer. The modifications that were created at WVNET were distributed all over the world by the IBM user's group SHARE. The systems programmer who created these modifications was Jay Hall.

October 1975

Four IBM 3420 tape drives were purchased. The new tape drives were faster then the old 2400 tape drives and supported a new density (6250 BPI) which increased the amount of information that could be stored on a single tape by a factor of three. Since the old tape drives were still being used, users now had access to seven tape drives, plus the hypertapes.

December 1975

WVNET began an upgrade at each institution of higher learning. The upgrade included thirteen Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP 11/40 minicomputers, running RT-11 and DOS/BATCH at most institutions. These PDP 11/40s replaced five IBM 1130s, two IBM System 3s, four Data 100 terminals, one IBM 360/22, and one NCR 101. The upgrade was completed in March of 1976. Most of the colleges and universities in West Virginia were now running the same hardware and software. This was a major improvement in local computing at most institutions.

1976

June 1976

WVNET sought a means for extending the life span of the aging 360/75. This was important since WVNET simply did not have the funds to replace the 360/75 with a 370 CPU with greater "horse power." There had to be an affordable way to provide improved performance at minimum cost. WVNET installed one megabyte of high speed memory made by Intermem on the 360/75. This memory was specially designed for WVNET, which then had the only 360/75 computer with two megabytes of high speed memory in the world.

July 1976

WVNET was facing a whole new set of demands from its user community. Users not only needed more computer resources but were demanding the ability to run very large programs. MVT and the 360/75 did not support paging and virtual memory, so the maximum memory available to users was less than one megabyte. The only solution was to acquire a separate 370 computer with an operating system that supported paging. The WVNET systems staff was aware that it would be a difficult task to create a system running on two CPUs with two different operating systems and still maintain the environment in which its user community had grown comfortable. The first step was taken with the installation of a new IBM 370/145 computer.

September 1976

The new 370/145 became available to the user community. It was running SVS, an operating system that had evolved from MVT. SVS supported paging and ran a new version of HASP. There was some pain associated with the change. The systems staff had decided that the optimum solution was to run a shared spool system, with MVT and SVS sharing the same job queue. This meant that MVT had to be converted to the SVS version of the HASP spooling system. The users were forced to make many JCL changes. The new shared spool system was a success and provided our users with a single system image. One part of the conversion to shared spool was the movement of all hardware except the new 370 to a larger machine room.

1977

August 1977

The 370/145 was replaced with an IBM 370/148. This upgrade provided approximately 25% more CPU power. The 370/148 also had an additional 2 channels for data transfer. SVS continued to be the operating system running on the 370 CPU. Users experienced no changes other than better performance.

1978

September 1978

The IBM 370/148 was replaced with a Nasco AS/5 computer. The AS/5 was equivalent to an IBM 370/158 with 3 Megabytes of memory and 6 channels. SVS ran on the new AS/5 and MVT was still running on the 360/75.

November 1978

Six additional 3420 tape drives were installed. The WVNET user community was becoming familiar with tape as a medium for storing large amounts of data. The number of tape volumes stored at WVNET was increasing and the turnaround for jobs requiring tape mounts had become bad enough to require the investment in additional tape drives.

1979

February 1979

As noted above, WVUCC had installed Wylbur, an editor with RJE capability, in 1972. Wylbur had been the major timesharing service available to the user community up to this time. WVNET's management team and systems staff began to explore more sophisticated time sharing services for IBM equipment. Both of IBM's major offerings, Time Sharing Option (TSO) and Virtual Machine/Conversational Monitor System (VM/CMS), were explored. It was decided that TSO was not the answer. An attempt was made to run VM/370 with SVS running under it; this was not successful and was withdrawn immediately. SVS ran very poorly under VM. If WVNET was to run a VM system some better combination of software was needed.

March 1979

For a number of months the systems staff experimented with MVT under VM. It was discovered that MVT under VM ran almost as well as SVS on a bare machine. The major reason for running SVS was to give users access to a virtual address space that would allow them to run very large programs. Since MVT running under VM could be given a 16 megabyte address space and VM would handle all paging for MVT, it was decided that there was no real reason to stick with SVS. VM/370 Release 4 was placed in production with MVT running under it. Initially, VM's Conversational Monitor System (CMS) was available only to WVNET staff and a very small number of outside users because of a lack of communication lines.

September 1979

WVNET was now in the process of migrating to more modern hardware and software. WVNET wanted to begin using IBM 3350 disk drives in native mode to provide the users with increased disk space. Unfortunately, MVT did not support 3350 DASD. WVNET began to research the possibility of converting to the more powerful MVS operating system. SVS was no longer an option since IBM had dropped support for this operating system. VS1, which might have been a reasonable solution, did not support HASP. Then the WVNET systems staff discovered that Johns Hopkins was running a modified version of HASP with VS1. Investigation revealed that this required no modifications to VS1: they were running the same HASP as WVNET, with some minor modifications to allow it to run in the VS1 environment. The decision was made to replace one of WVNET's two MVT operating systems with Johns Hopkins' implementation of VS1/HASP. This change required no modifications in how the users did business.

October 1979

VM/CMS was made available to all users. At the same time York APL and CPS were retired. The original software available under CMS was VS/APL, VS/BASIC, PASCAL, SNOBOL, WATFIV, PL/I F, PL/I Opt, Fortran G, GPSS V, Cobol U, Minitab, and the assembler.