MCP

 

Geschichte

A timeline of "MCP" in my life course.

4681-84 Experience

I was the systems programmer in a Burroughs shop, the talk page has more on this.

4715 Story

In my domain space concept, it is the designation for the OS superstructure on a node 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.

4718-20

α/β period:

In this period the elements of the DCP are prototyped, marshalled, deployed then productized:

1. Get working build of all packages in same form they will ultimately be used in the product.
2. Get working build of newly created elements such as the DGUI/SPO and WFL.
3. Apply the above to the proto domains.
4. Workout in service of the proto domains.
5. 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.

Mainframe Redux

The first referent of MCP is the OS 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). . See the talk page for more recent experience with the system that inspires my use of 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 (3.8) may replace MCP. Similarly, as far as first mainframe production nodes are concerned, zOS will likely replace MCP unless there's no affordable path to it, MCP Express is near current and free which the anywhere near current and even some of the old IBM stuff isn't. In any case my concepts are under this name only as a homage, as is common in the industry, and is not based on the large systems architecture.

MCP and WFL

Prior to milestones 2 and 4 in the 4718-20 story §, 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 scoped to literate programming and DDD support but one aspect is job control mapped to lang, centrally a dialect of Algol. 1st service just gets a nascent platform up and is essentially the low level bootstrap for the OS concept. Details in the bookshelf docs.

¹ Requiring first class entitlement.

CP 4721

Blank for formatting purpose.

See also

• Documentation

Footnotes