MV/10000

Introduced in 1983, the MV/10000 has been described as “the MV/8000 done right”. Indeed, many of the refinements to the MV architecture made in this machine soon found their way into the MV/8000 Model II.

Marketing

(see Gallery below)

Specific Documentation

Gallery

Memories

Steve M.

In the late 1980s I worked for a bank in the City of London where a pair of MV/10000s supported around sixty directly-connected FX traders. These machines ran AOS/VS and a suite of software written in-house in a mixture of PL/1, MASM and I think a tiny bit of COBOL for some TPMS screens. Everything was centred around an INFOS_II database. There were data feeds in from Reuters and Telerate, and a feed out to one of the corporate mainframes (IBM). Physical tapes were also written during the working day and sent somewhere after close of business.

The hardware was interesting in that each machine mirrored the other on hot-standby and there was a big switch between them to control which one was the ‘live’ one. We also had a fun device from DG’s Special Systems Division: the Video Chassis. If I remember correctly it was basically a character-mapped 48-way video card! It was always fun ensuring that the keyboard input (via IACs) corresponded to the video output for a given desk; in those pre-network days the cabling was a real nightmare.

The MV/10000s were very reliable and we achieved fantastic uptime figures. Much later I learned that the software we developed for these machines was decommissioned in 1999 but I don’t know what hardware was in use by then.