Re: How many other editors in use

DMcCunney <plugh@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Jerry Peters wrote:
DMcCunney <plugh@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Jerry Peters wrote:
DMcCunney <plugh@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I'd forgotten that IBM made zOS UNIX conforming. Anything that passed
Spec 1170 could call itself UNIX, so it was theoretically possible for
an IBM mainframe OS to become so. I recall being deeply amused when I
heard that IBM had actually *done* it.

From the documentation, it seemed to be a fairly complete UNIX
implementation. I always wondered what kind of performance you'd get
from a shell pipline that creates say 5 or 6 processes, or something
like "find . -name '*.c' -exec grep -iH 'string' \;" in a large source
directory, considering how heavy-weight creating an address space is
in MVS.

That depends on how they did it. (I haven't looked into it, and don't
know.) If you don't assume an address space is equivalent to a process,
I think you might go through the trouble of creating an address space
once, then have all of that stuff running as processes within that
address space.

I vaguely remember some sort of option to use tasks in a single AS in
place of separate processes, undoubtably for performance reasons. I

There are an assortment of mainframe programs that advertise things like
"Allows up to 200 users to share a single address space", so I think you
are quite right.

Yeah, TONE Software, also ROSCOE from ADP.

never used USS. I read the documentation more out of curiosity than
any actual need. Got out of MVS systems programming over 10 years ago
when I got tired of the IBM motto "we make the simple difficult", ie
things that used to take me half an hour or so turned into half day
chores.

<grin> I encountered that for other reasons. The machine I started on
was a 370 plug-compatible under VS1, "supporting" 300 CICS users with
2MB of physical memory supporting 16MB of virtual memory. "Death by
thrashing" was a common occurrence.

I worked at a large (for the time) bank. We had a pair of 370-155's
with 2MB of storage running MVT. We had a CICS region for credit card
processing that ran in 305KB IIRC. It ran very nicely too.


I had a cartoon in my cube of a service tech walking in to a site saying
"System been down long?" to a skeleton in a chair draped with cobwebs.
Someone put a copy in the office of the VP/IT. He was not amused. He
had begun as a COBOL programmer, and there was still one program on the
system that was "his" program that he maintained for fun. He sat down
at the terminal to do some work on his program, and Lo! The system was
down...

I remember that cartoon!
I was once at a site as a contractor where some of us gave the ops
manager a yoyo, since the system was up and down so much.

I kind of wonder about using vi to edit a member of a PDS...

How about accessing VSAM files in a UNIX-like program? There was
probably some way to do it, and I'll bet it wasn't pretty.

Arghhh! "Generation Dataset Error"

Back when I was in the mainframe world, my experience was that I would
encounter a problem, pull down the manula for the part of the system I
was dealing with, turn to the chapter covering the utility I was using,
and where my problem should have been mentioned there was a reference to
another manual I didn't have, no matter how many manuals I accumulated.

I have never seen a *complete* set of s390 (though it was s370 back
then) manuals. I suspect they would have filled the cube I worked in.
When I started playing with Unix, and a complete set of manuals was
three small sized binders taking about a foot of space on the shelf, I
was awe struck. I was reminded of the mainframer in a letter to
Computerworld or some such who recalled getting information on Unix, and
walking in to his boss, laying it his boss' desk, and plaintively saying
"How could we have been so wrong for so long, and nobody told us?"

Jerry
When I was a sysprog at ALCOA we had the "software library" which was
a good sized room filled with large bookcases containing most of
the IBM manals for MVS, IMS, CICS, & our hardware; probably several
hundred.
The software library & the 4381 dedicated to tech support use were
two of the major reasons I took the job.
Now, of course, they're available on CD & probably DVD. And alot of
them are available at IBM's web site in PDF format. Made searching
Message & Codes much easier, especially for those IDC messages that
had multiple sub-codes that went on for pages.

______
Dennis
.

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