“I work with VMware. Explained what it was in rough sketches to my Dad, who replied, “Hmm. I did that 30 years ago on an old System 34”.”
VM’s actually predate even that. I didn’t see the rise of x86 VM’s coming because at first, the systems were crude, with no guaranteed levels of performance, granularity, and other types of manageability - all of which IBM and other mainframe manufacturers were doing years ago. The last few x86 generations added the magic instructions needed for this, and VMware’s newest stuff does a pretty good job of it.
I did that 30 years ago on an old System 34
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I did that 35+ years ago on a much older IBM 3031-AP running CMS (predecessor to “VM”) with “PROFS” as the mail client (predecessor to “outlook”).