Phoenix (computer)

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Phoenix was the name of an IBM mainframe computer at Cambridge University's Computer Laboratory. "Phoenix/MVS" was also the name of the computer's operating system, written in-house by Computer Laboratory members. Its DNS hostname was phx.cam.ac.uk.

At the time of Phoenix's installation in 1971, it was an IBM 370/165 with one mebibyte of RAM. By 1973 this was increased to two mebibytes of RAM and a thousand megabytes of disk space. In 1982 it was upgraded to an IBM 3081D, and in 1989 to a 3084Q. It was finally decommissioned 24 years after its installation, on 30 September 1995.

The staff of the Computer Laboratory were motivated to write their own system software for the IBM installation as a result of their dissatisfaction with IBM's own interactive command interpreter TSO. They had an ambition to support at least one hundred simultaneously logged-in users, but found that TSO had difficulty supporting more than twenty for the hardware the laboratory could afford. The initial product of their efforts was a Phoenix command interpreter which completely replaced the TSO command interpreter and was also available as a language for controlling batch job submissions through the use of a single IBM JCL command to invoke the Phoenix command interpreter. Some of the Phoenix authors were familiar with the Unix operating system, and, as a result, the Phoenix command interpreter acquired some of the features of Unix shells (for example here-documents - inline input files).

Several large early British interactive fiction games, including Acheton, Sangraal, and Fyleet, were developed on Phoenix before being sold commercially for microcomputers by Acornsoft and, later, Topologika. This was comparable to Infocom's contemporaneous commercialisation of the MIT mainframe game Zork. Many of these games were subsequently translated by Graham Nelson to run on the Z-Machine.

Phoenix also hosted a lively bulletin board named GROGGS, which fostered the community spirit amongst the machine's users. After Phoenix was decommissioned, GROGGS migrated to the Internet, and survives to this day.

Phoenix inspired great affection in its users, to such an extent that a wake was held on 1st September 1995 to mourn its passing. A University newsgroup called "ucam.phx.nostalgia" was also created for reminiscences.


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