The IBM Cambridge Scientific Center was a company research laboratory established in February 1964 in

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston, ...

. Situated at 545 Technology Square (''Tech Square''), in the same building as MIT's Project MAC, it was later renamed the IBM Scientific Center. It is most notable for creating the

CP-40 CP-40 was a research precursor to CP-67, which in turn was part of IBM's then-revolutionary CP 67CMS – a virtual machine/virtual memory time-sharing operating system for the IBM System/360 Model 67, and the parent of IBM's VM family. CP-40 ran ...

and the ''control program'' portions of

CP/CMS CP/CMS (Control Program/Cambridge Monitor System) is a discontinued time-sharing operating system of the late 1960s and early 1970s, known for its excellent performance and advanced features. It had three distinct versions: * CP-40/CMS, an ...

, a

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/ emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized h ...

operating system developed for the

IBM System/360-67 The IBM System/360 Model 67 (S/360-67) was an important IBM mainframe model in the late 1960s. * It had "its own powerful operating system... heTime Sharing System monitor (TSS)" offering "virtually instantaneous access to and response from t ...

History

The IBM Data Processing Division (DPD) sponsored five Scientific Center research groups in the United States and some others around the world to work with selected universities on a variety of customer-related projects. The IBM Research Division in Yorktown Heights, NY was a separate laboratory organization at the

Thomas J. Watson Research Center The Thomas J. Watson Research Center is the headquarters for IBM Research. The center comprises three sites, with its main laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York, U.S., 38 miles (61 km) north of New York City, Albany, New York and wit ...

that tended more to "pure" research topics. The DPD Scientific Centers in the late 1960s were located in Palo Alto, California, Houston, Texas, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Grenoble, France. The IBM Time-Life Programming Center in Manhattan, New York worked with the scientific centers but had a slightly different reporting line. Established by Norm Rasmussen, the Cambridge Scientific Center worked with computing groups at both MIT and Harvard, in the same building as Project MAC and the IBM Boston Programming Center (BPC). Additional joint projects involved the MIT Lincoln Laboratory on the outskirts of Boston and Brown University in Providence, RI. The scientific center in 1969 had three main departments: Computer Graphics under Craig Johnson, Operations Research under John Harmon, and Operating Systems under Richard (Rip) Parmelee. In December 1975 Richard MacKinnon became director of the center, succeeding Dr. William Timlake who, in turn, had succeeded Rasmussen. As the third director, MacKinnon was to serve as its longest-tenured director. During his tenure, Cambridge Scientific Center was responsible for a number of enhancements to the

VM/370 VM (often: VM/CMS) is a family of IBM virtual machine operating systems used on IBM mainframes System/370, System/390, zSeries, System z and compatible systems, including the Hercules emulator for personal computers. The following ver ...

operating system which became IBM's most popular interactive computing system. These included: an enhanced scheduler for the operating system based on the work of Lynn Wheeler; the VNET networking capability based upon the work of Edson Hendricks and Tim Hartman; multiprocessor support for the IBM asymmetric MPs, led by Howard Holley; IBM's first

UNIX Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, ...

system under VM for the

National Security Agency The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collecti ...

; a remote operations capability for VM led by Love Seawright and David Boloker and done in conjunction with the University of Maine, Orono ; a special controller which allowed ASCII terminals to access VM ; and the ASCII software support for the IBM PC which allowed PCs to access IBM and many other non-IBM mainframes . The VNET networking software became the basis for IBM's internal corporate data network and the university BITNET network which was facilitated by Cambridge in conjunction with Yale Computer Center and CUNY computer center . MacKinnon served at Cambridge for 18 years and in July 1992 had the unenviable responsibility of closing CSC when IBM decided to close all its scientific centers worldwide. IBM closed the center on July 31, 1992.Melinda Varian
''VM and the VM Community: Past, Present, and Future''
April 1991, page 50

Selected publications

R. J. Adair, R. U. Bayles, L. W. Comeau, and R. J. Creasy, "A Virtual Machine System for the 360/40," IBM Corporation, Cambridge Scientific Center, Report No. 320-2007 (May 1966). R. A. Meyer and L. H. Seawright, "A Virtual Machine Timesharing System," IBM Systems Journal 9, No.3, 199-218 (1970). R. P. Parmelee, T. L. Peterson, C. C. Tillman, and D. J. Hatfield, "Virtual Storage and Virtual Machine Concepts," IBM Systems Journal 11, No.2, 99-130 (1972). E. C. Hendricks and T. C. Hartmann, "Evolution of a Virtual Machine Subsystem," IBM Systems Journal 18, No.1, 111-142 (1979). L. H. Holley, R. P. Parmelee, C. A. Salisbury, and D. N. Saul, "VM/370 Asymmetric Multiprocessing," IBM Systems Journal 18, No.1, 47-70 (1979). L. H. Seawright and R. A. MacKinnon, "VM/370 - A Study of Multiplicity and Usefulness," IBM Systems Journal 18, No. 1, 4-17 (1979). R. J. Creasy, "The Origin of the VM/370 Time-Sharing System," IBM Journal of Research and Development 25, No.5, 483-490 (September 1981). F. T. Kozuh, D. L. Livingston, and T. C. Spillman, "System/370 Capability in a Desktop Computer," IBM Systems Journal 23, No.3, 245-254 (1984). Y. Bard, "The VM Performance Planning Facility (VMPPF)," Computer Measurement Group (CMG) Transactions 53, 53- 59 (Summer 1986).

References

{{IBM, state=uncollapsed IBM facilities 1964 establishments in Massachusetts 1992 disestablishments in Massachusetts VM (operating system)

History

Selected publications

See also

References