MCP
A timeline of "MCP" in my life course.
MCP 4 Era
The first referent of the acronym is the operating system of the same name, which was at release 19 in 2019. I was the systems programmer at Daytona Beach Community, now Daytona State College which was then a Burroughs shop as my second multi-year job out of college ('83-'85). [1]
See the talk page for more recent experience with the system which (no more than) inspired the name. The IBM docker container is actually much closer to what I'm doing with DCP so unless the next release of MCP Express has a lot of improvements, MVS (as modern zOS) may replace MCP as far as first mainframe nodes are concerned unless there's no affordable path to support their current lines.
4715 Story
In a my domain space concept, it is the designation for nodes of a Domain Control Program (DCP).
«MCP» is the operating system abstraction on a single node of a cluster, or cloud of computers with fast interconnectivity, miniminally 1 gigabit per second. The MCPs operate as the nodes of the larger OS construct, the DCP. MCP itself has these components/layers:
- The top level which is a distributed lisp image running a generic blackboard model of realtime operations control and knowledge base management.
- The workflow level which is implemented by the Work Flow Language, another Burroughs inspiration, reimagined as a context for literate programming and revival of the job control concept based on an adaptation of WFL to the DCP context.
- A base layer close to machine level using the c++ actor framework and optionally a custom debian kernel.
So DCP, in my scheme, is actually the thing analogous to Unisys MCP, comparing whole OS constructs to each other. OTOH, DCP is principally a domain knowledge engineering environement, its OS aspects are fully encapsulated in the network of MCPs abstraction. Also, per the discussion, MVS is likely to be the first actual mainframe OS based MCP.
MCP and WFL
Prior to milestones 2 and 4 in the next §, a MCP shell/remote SPO service presenting a modified bash with the following features will be deployed¹:
- modified regular LSB bash, default debian 10 or ubuntu 18
- integrated with the C-六 python ADT (ansible, docker, twisted) service
- carries basic model and implementation of the single system image on its swarm
- built-in inventory and playbooks for provisioning on AWS and linode
Like MCP, WFL has a sense in my works that is quite close to the thing in Unisys MCP OS but the overall thing is quite different. My WFL concept is more oriented to literate programming and dev support than just job control but there are levels to it and one is job control as a dialect of Algol. The fielded service just gets this latter sense up to a first level and is essentially the low level bootstrap for the OS concept. Details are in the bookshelf docs.
¹ Requiring first class entitlement.4718-20
α/β period:
In this period the elements of the DCP are prototyped, marshalled, deployed then productized:
- Get working build of all packages in same form they will ultimately be used in the product.
- Get working build of newly created elements such as the DGUI/SPO and WFL.
- Apply the above to the proto domains.
- Workout in service of the proto domains.
- Do productization/packaging for mass deployment
CP 4721 roughly corresponds to what is produced by 1 and 2 and the AKDOMHST/SVC SKUs to 5.
CP 4721
Blank for formatting purpose.
See also
Footnotes
