My career with IBM started in 1981. My initial job was in Poughkeepsie, NY as a tester on the VM/HPO product. My first project was to test the support for >16Meg of storage on HPO 2.5. Wow! Who could possibly need more than 16Meg of storage on a computer? I moved with VM to Kingston, NY in 1983 and worked in VM/HPO development until moving to Endicott, NY with VM/ESA in 1990.

My Current job is working on CP SPOOL, HSERV (Host Services), and VSIM (Virtual Simulation) subsystems of the VM/ESA product. I do a combination of service and development work in these areas of the Control Program.

I have recently taken ownership of the VM scheduler and dispatcher as well. On August 20, 2002 the U.S. Patent Office issued a patent (number 6,438,704) for some of the work John Harris and I did on the VM scheduler. If you'd like to read the patent, go to the patent office search web site and enter the patent number from above.

Over the years I have been involved in many VM releases and projects, first as a tester and then as a developer. Here is a list of the projects I worked on. This list may bring back some memories to those of you who have been long time VM community members.

• Function tester in Poughkeepsie, NY
  • VM/HPO 2.5 Greater than 16M Support
• Tester in Kingston, NY
  • VM/HPO 3.0 retrofit on new VM/SP release
  • VM/HPO 3.4 Swapper Paging Support (team leader)
  • VM/HPO 4.0 retrofit on new VM/SP release
• Developer in Kingston, NY
  • VM/HPO 3.6 multi-exposure cache DASD device support
  • DIRMAINT release 3 (developer -- team leader)
  • DIRMAINT release 4 (developer -- team leader)
• Developer in Endicott, NY
  • VM/ESA 1.2.2 SPXTAPE (team leader)
  • z/VM 3.1.0 z/Archtecture support (VSIM team leader)
  • z/VM 4.1.0
  • z/VM 4.2.0
  • z/VM 4.3.0
  • z/VM 4.4.0 Scheduler Lock Contention Reduction
  • z/VM 5.1.0
  • z/VM 5.2.0

In the z/VM 3.1.0 project I was team leader for the VSIM portion of the 64-bit VM development project to support the new IBM zSeries machines. This large software development project was part of the development of z/VM. The VSIM and Storage Management teams of our organization spent several years on the development of the 64-bit portion of this new VM product.

One of my projects in the past was as the team leader for the development of SPXTAPE. Click on the following for an in-depth description of SPXTAPE; what it is and how it works.

SPXTAPE - a new way to back up SPOOL

OK, SPXTAPE is not especially new since it became available with VM/ESA 1.2.2 but it's probably new to some of you. Check this out if you use SPTAPE and want a faster/better way.

As a matter of fact, SPXTAPE can be used in conjunction with a package called SPFPACK from the VM Download Library to do some useful things. If you need a way to drain all SPOOL files from a particular CP Owned DASD volume so that it can be taken offline, you might want to take a look at the SPFPACK package.

Feel free to contact me at mlorenc@us.ibm.com