| I came to Amdahl Corporation in 1983 with considerable experience with an IBM 360/65, 370/158, 3033, and 4331 environment; and knowing IBM VM/370, MVS, JCL, Utilities, VSAM, System/370 Assembler, COBOL, several scripting languages; and having worked as a performance analyst and CICS systems programmer experienced with InterTest. I became a hardware cross-trained Systems Engineer (dangerous, I know ;) supporting the 470, 580, and 5890 series of processors and whatever software our customers ran on these systems. |
| Amdahl put me through a considerable amount of training. These notebooks document that training. In short, this collection shows what a systems engineer had to know in the 1980s to support the customers of Amdahl mainframe computers. I envision some poor PhD student a hundred years from now working on a dissertation about late 20th century mainframe computers and rejoicing when they stumble across these notebooks. |
| These three spiral-bound notebooks describe the architecture and operation of the Amdahl 580 and 5890 processors. Click on the image to open the PDF files. The original physical notebooks are now in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History together with my heavily annotated Amdahl 470 Field Engineering Reference Manual which, alas, I did not scan due to its large format. Click on the image to access the PDF. |
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Amdahl Systems Engineer Training Notebook 001 Contents: Introduction to Amdahl Corporation, Mainframe environments & components, MVS Concepts & Facilities, Hardware prerequisites, MVS System Fundamentals, Virtual to Real and Real to Virtual address translation. |
Amdahl Systems Engineer Training Notebook 002 Contents: Program Fundamentals, VM/370, MVS Installation Workshop, VTAM, System Management Facility (SMF), Amdahl Research Tools. |
Amdahl Systems Engineer Training Notebook 003 Contents: Recovery Management System (RMS), Teleprocessing Fundamentals, System Network Architecture (SNA), X.25, Channel Communications, Data General Nova 1200 Console Processor (CPS), Amdahl 470 (note: this is a fairly detailed overview of the 470), MVS Structure and Flow (the best class I ever took). |
Amdahl Systems Engineer Training Notebook 004 Contents: MVS/XA Differences, MVS/XA Diagnostics, MVS Measurement and Tuning. |
Amdahl Systems Engineer Training Notebook 005 Contents: Amdahl Macrocode Structure and Debugging, MVS/XA Debugging (another very good course). |
Amdahl Systems Engineer Training Notebook 006 Contents: VM/SP Installation, Amdahl Multiple Domain Facility (MDF), VM/HPO CP Internals (another great course). |
Amdahl Systems Engineer Training Notebook 007 Contents: VM/HPO CP Internals (continued), Unix for Programmers, My notes for Programming in C by Stephen Kochan (I was learning C in order to support...), Amdahl UTS System Administration (the first mainframe implementation of Unix), Amdahl UTS/F, Amdahl 4705 Architecture, UTS/F Installation and Diagnostics, AT&T BX.25 Network Architecture. |
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If my memory serves correctly, the Amdahl 5890 was the last mainframe designed wholly by Amdahl engineers. From a support perspective it was beautifully & elegantly engineered in terms internal architecture, operation, and physical implementation. It was a joy to work on. 
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