Virtual Machines: The Virtual Reality

Ok, so according to YourDictionary.com and a variety of other Dictionary’s

Virtual (vir·tu·al) adj 
\ˈvər-chə-wəl, -chəl; ˈvərch-wəl\  
defined as 

“In effect, although not in actual fact...”

While Chatting with a Friend

The other day while speaking to a friend of mine, who shall be nameless to protect his identity, but is a cigar and Port wine aficionado, and perhaps one of the many bright individuals I have been lucky to encounter, is a Pick alumni, i.e, a Pick System programmer from the Jurassic period.  Said casually to me, “oh yah, too bad Pick never followed his invention, the virtual machine, or his company would have been one of the giants…”  I thought, hmmm, I wonder if this allegation has any credence, so I thought let’s put it to the test…

So I didn’t have to go far to see what the world thought of his assertion, for if you were going to look up who or what gave birth to the Virtual Machine, you would find that hands down, this accolade is attributed to IBM, big blue, big surprise.  Much like Russia, claiming the invention of everything, even Baseball, IBM pretty much lays claim on all that is computer… “Dah, De Vertual Machine, dis come from IBM…”

Anyway, here are just a few excerpts references, basically the tip of the berg, but at least the top three Google items… Now read them carefully, because they will play an important part of my point…

1)        The History of Virtual Machines By Eric Kohlbrenner, Dana Morris, and Brett Morris

“Around 1965 the researchers at IBM … devised a scheme where they needed to be able to partition the machine into "smaller pieces". These pieces needed to be able to manage their own resources so that the researchers could test many different conditions in the system at the same time without altering the other "pieces" of the system. They believed an implementation as a virtual machine could work extremely well for this experiment.”

Source: http://cs.gmu.edu/cne/itcore/virtualmachine/history.htm

2)         Short History of IBM’s Virtual Machines by Norman Hardy

“When IBM introduced the 360 model 67, circa 1967, …A team of IBM people in Cambridge MA conceived and built a program for the 67 that would provide the illusion of several standard 360’s which lacked virtual memory. This program was called CP 67. The Cambridge team also produced a simple interactive one user operating system called CMS. CMS would run happily and efficiently on one of the virtual machines provided by CP 67, or on a real 360 for that matter.”

Source: http://cap-lore.com/CP.html

3)        History of Virtualization By VMWARE.com, 2012 (wow, really, Et Tu Brute'..?)

“Virtualization was first implemented more than 30 years ago by IBM as a way to logically partition mainframe computers into separate virtual machines."

Source: http://www.vmware.com/virtualization/history.html

Ok, now what this concludes is that IBM employees conceived this virtual machine by taking the IBM 360 and deploying this software Control Program, CP-67 that create their virtual machine in 1967… 

 

So, to dig deeper, I decided to verify the dates on the origins of the CP-67.  I found a reference that Wiki pointed to,

IBM Mainframe Operating Systems:  “Timeline and Brief Explanation For the IBM System/360 and Beyond” By Dave Morton, Version 27  -  December 2011 . 

“The VM Operating System (Virtual Machine):  (CP/40) -  Control Program for System/360 Model 40.  Originated in 1966.  CP/40 was an IBM internal product. Not released to customers. In addition, the more famous Control Program frequently listed as the father of Virtual Machines, the CP/67  - Control Program for System/360 model 67.Released externally in 1967.”

Source: http://www.demorton.com/Tech/$OSTL.pdf

So that was verified, but what about my friend’s casual assertion.  So I rifled through several source to see what Pick’s History was, and here is what I found…

“A Brief History of REALITY™”, from The History of MicroData & “Pick Operating System” from Wikipedia.org

Wikipedia “Pick Operating System” the Pick System was originally implemented as the Generalized Information Retrieval Language System (GIRLS) on an IBM System/360 in 1965(Incidentally pre dating the above) by Don Nelson and Dick Pick (keep the laughter to a minimum) at TRW for delivery to the U.S. Army in 1969 to control the inventory of Cheyenne helicopter parts. 

Now here it comes… wait for it…  

The main design aims were that it was to be an efficient database, with integrated data retrieval, which could be applied to many physical computer systems. In order to achieve the latter a "virtual machine" concept was used that emulated typical physical computer systems. This places GIM as one of the first multi-platform, general-purpose computing environment projects.

Sources: http://www.microdata-alumni.org/historical.htm; 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system

In Plain English…

The Virtual Machines may have its origins attributed to TRW and Dick Pick, NOT IBM! 

Whhaaaaaaaaat?!!!  

Yes, although not as popular, or sexy as the IBM story, the precepts of today’s origins Virtual Machine came from a guy named Dick Pick…

So thanks to Dick Pick, the moral of the story kids,  to steal from an old adage, 'You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your parents' .


Now is this true?  Have I uncovered a truth?  Who knows, every day we find out that Christopher Columbus was behind at least 4 other parties that visited America first, the most recent verified  group and the current reigning champ is the Japanese (that's a whole different blog). So have I made history, doubt it, but one this is for certain,  the situation is that the origins of the Virtual Machine coming from IBM, may be 

“In effect, although not in actual fact...”

So “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;”

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About Rick Ricker
An IT professional with over 20 years experience in Information Security, wireless broadband, network and Infrastructure design, development, and support.


For more information, contact Rick at (800) 333-8394 x 689