Lesson plan
SIMMON
SIMMON (Simulation Monitor) was a proprietary software testing system developed in the late 1960s in the IBM Product Test Laboratory, then at Poughkeepsie, New York It was designed for the then-new line of System/360 computers as a vehicle for testing the software that IBM was developing for that architecture. SIMMON was first described at the IBM SimSymp 1968 symposium, held at Rye, New York. SIMMON was a hypervisor, similar to the IBM CP-40 system that was being independently developed at the Cambridge Scientific Center at about that same time. The chief difference from CP-40 was that SIMMON supported a single virtual machine for testing of a single guest program running there. CP-40 supported many virtual machines for time-sharing production work. CP-40 evolved by many stages into the present VM/CMS operating system. SIMMON was a useful test vehicle for many years. SIMMON was designed to dynamically include independently developed programs (test tools) for testing the target guest program. The SIMMON kernel maintained control over the hardware (and the guest) and coordinated invocation of the test tools.
Article summary
SIMMON (Simulation Monitor) was a proprietary software testing system developed in the late 1960s in the IBM Product Test Laboratory, then at Poughkeepsie, New York It was designed for the then-new line of System/360 computers as a vehicle for testing the software that IBM was developing for that architecture. SIMMON was first described at the IBM SimSymp 1968 symposium, held at Rye, New York. SIMMON was a hypervisor, similar to the IBM CP-40 system that was being independently developed at the Cambridge Scientific Center at about that same time. The chief difference from CP-40 was that SIMMON supported a single virtual machine for testing of a single guest program running there. CP-40 supported many virtual machines for time-sharing production work. CP-40 evolved by many stages into the present VM/CMS operating system. SIMMON was a useful test vehicle for many years. SIMMON was designed to dynamically include independently developed programs (test tools) for testing the target guest program. The SIMMON kernel maintained control over the hardware (and the guest) and coordinated invocation of the test tools.
Key claims
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Discussion questions
- Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
- Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
- If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?
Bibliography
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Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.