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OS/390 Replaced By z/OS
n7lyg writes: "ZDnet reports that IBM is replacing the venerable OS/390 with something called z/OS. What I want to know is if using z/OS is still like 'kicking a dead whale down the beach,' as Ken Thompson once said of one of its predecessors (DOS? OS/360? I forget the exact OS he was complaining about)." Well, z/OS does add 64-bit support and other goodies.
It's amazing how so many people on this site seem to be ignorant of mainframes. OS/390 has nothing whatsoever to do with DOS or anything like that. OS/390 is the collection of MVS/ESA and associated programs. Before this, there was MVS/XA, MVS/370 and so forth. The news that its name is changing to z/OS is actually quite old, and z/OS 1.0 is basically the same as OS/390 V2R10. As for kicking a dead whale, if you're using ISPF/PDF over TSO, the interface can actually be quite pleasant. It's a different way of doing things though, as you need to forget everything you've ever learned about VT terminals and learn about a TN3270. The main advantage of the new 64-bit technology is that you basically don't have to worry about memory anymore as you can have ungodly amounts. As for programming on a mainframe, I am 18 and I work at Lexis-Nexis (do your legal and other research at www.lexis-nexis.com, keep me in a job) in the mainframe department, and I recently finished a relatively large program written completely in C. If you don't like C, they have standard compilers for C++, Pascal, COBOL, PL/I, Java, etc. So, don't hate on OS/390 just because you haven't booted into anything other than Linux for the last year.
I was under the impression that DOS is on the way out, now that Windows XP has been released. Why is IBM still basing a mainframe OS on it? Are mainframe programs _really_ that hard to port to a modern language like C? All that RPG and Rexx is so hard to maintain it would be cheaper to rewrite in a modern language.
Uh yeah, I can think of a few.
Windows 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, 95, 95OSR2, 98, 98SE, NT3.1, NT3.5, NT4, 2000, ME, XP
Sorry, but I beg to differ. You can't beat the IBM laptops with a stick, and for corporate use the IBM desktop machines have stuff in them that make my life a WHOLE lot easier. And, they are bloody fast.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
...that is to say, they inform people about products. Now, stop and think for a moment. One of the reasons that corporations suck so much is because they take advantage of uneducated consumers, right? But if you have 15 corporations each educating consumers about the advantages of their product and the disadvantages of their competition... you just covered all the information anyone needs to know with regards to product availability.
/is/ a multinational corporation! does that mean we're evil?)
This is a very good thing. Were there no marketing, how would people find out about new products? How would those running stores be convinced to sell them? This applies every bit as much to products created by 100-man shop as a multinational corporation (oops, my 100-man shop
Marketroids are genuinely important. They may not create value, but they help those who do by helping connect those who create value with those who have a need for it. Their methods may be sometimes sleazy, but that's not to say there's anything wrong with the profession as a whole.
I have no problem with marketing when all they do is serve as mouthpieces. When they take control of other organizational functions is when they become a destructive force.
If you'd like a chance to convince me about the evils of capitalism, btw, my email address is available.
Ironic way to end a post in a thread about an IBM release . . .
I don't know how it functions now, but historically, IBM has been a sales force with a staggering research unit. It is sales and marketing that drove the system, with the tech units there to provide what would be sold.
IF they wanted to sell ice to eskimoes, they'd write the contract for ice stable at 40F, and the tech guys would come up with it . . .
Then along came competition . . .
hawk
> important part of any business
They could also serve as a valuable source of emergency protein during famines.
:)
hawk
http://nicse.hlrz.kfa-juelich.de/~cbest/postdoc.ht ml
There are also legends about how TSO sure is hard to use, but it's slow...
Just checking, but doesn't Sun provide some of the hardware for the Great Firewall of China?
(currently testing something about signatures here)
Remember that two of the three ways of running Linux on an S/390 (sorry z/Architecture) is to run it on a VM maintained by OS/390 (sorry, z/OS). Far from being "like kicking a dead whale down a beach", each instance will look and feel just like any other Linux installation you'd tried - Bash, Apache, remote X, you name it... execept for the small difference that you can create a new instance of a Linux system in under a minute, and you can have several THOUSAND such instances running a comparable performance to a PC, on z/Architecture machine.
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http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/
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...meaning both number-crunching and business applications; the S/360 instruction set was, at its core, binary, but, in addition to the floating-point instructions, it also included decimal-arithmetic and character-string instructions. (The floating-point and decimal instructions were, I think, extra-cost options on the original S/360 models or, at least, on the lower-end models.)
...because it ran on System/370. I suspect they might've bumped the system number because I think the first S/370's came out in, err, umm, the 1970's; they did make some instruction-set architecture changes, although the big change was the addition of an MMU (which was also in the System 360/67, but that wasn't a "mainstream" S/360). The very first S/370's didn't have the MMU, but later ones had it, and there were add-ons for those other models.
Not as far as I know. The "S/380" machines - which, I think, came out in the '80's - were, I think, given names like "3081" and "4300", i.e. they were sold with just model numbers, rather than as "System/380's", and the OS was probably just being called "MVS" at the time. (I think MVS may originally have been called "OS/370 VS2 with Multiple Virtual Spaces", to distinguish it from the version of VS2 with a Single Virtual Space - I think SVS just ran all processes in the same virtual address space, using the protection keys to keep them from stomping on each other, and using base-register relocation to allow programs to be run from wherever they happened to be loaded, just as was done on the non-virtual-memory OS/360, whereas MVS gave each process its own virtual address space.)
No prizes for guessing in what decade that came out. It ran on System/390's.
Unfortunately, that numbering scheme has, err, umm, a bit of a Y2K problem - would this decade's machines be "System/3100"s, or "System/3A0's", or "System/400"s (which would run the risk of confusion with AS/400's), or what?
So I guess they decided, now that they've introduced a 64-bit version of the architecture (not bad for an instruction set architecture whose design started in the early '60's, assuming it didn't start at the end of the '50's...), to come up with an Exciting New Name; I don't know whether that inspired this whole new "[a-z]Series" naming scheme, or not.
About 5-7 years ago, I read some magazine (I forget which one it was) that referred to Web stuff (or, at least, the forms-based version) as "3270 for the '90's". The host sends a form to the terminal, with fields to be filled in. The user at the terminal fills the forms in, and hits Transmit (or whatever it's called; perhaps they even called it "Submit" :-)), and the contents of the fields are sent back to the host. The host then processes the transaction, and sends another screenful back to the terminal. Sounds familiar....
> Are there any other OSes that have these properties?
// yendor
Well, there are always AIX, HP-UX and the dreaded NetWare. I don't think they hurt your foot or stink, but they do feel heavy to work with.
People will no doubt tell me that they don't or that solaris fits into that category as well but I'm only basing this on my work experience and it's a highly personal opinion so they might be right from their perspective.
OS/390 is one of the worst things I've ever worked with. I can only say one thing, anything new is welcome on these machines.
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It could be coffe.... or it could just be some warm brown liquid containing lots of caffeen.
I was thinking about terminal screenshots of the admin system.
// yendor
The OS/390 I've dealt with was not the most intuitive system and I like to work through terminalmode.
The IBM page talks about webserver, LDAP and such. It would be nice to se something of the administration.
Most screenshots are about as informative as a teminalpage so why not!
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It could be coffe.... or it could just be some warm brown liquid containing lots of caffeen.
Please do't use the 3 letter word :-)
// yendor
I didn't want to start a flamewar and SCO tends to be good fuel for some reason.
Last time I used a SCO it rebooted and recompiled the kernel worse than a windows 95 but that was an old version.
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It could be coffe.... or it could just be some warm brown liquid containing lots of caffeen.
> "Certainly not for apps though."
Do I need to poit it out?
Netware itself is not the whale-kicking type of OS, Netware apps and drivers are.
Oh the long and lonely nights
in my server room
kicking on the tape-backup
screaming for some working drivers
never ever getting printouts
the way we want them to.
(Poem from the Netware 4.xx days)
// yendor
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It could be coffe.... or it could just be some warm brown liquid containing lots of caffeen.
Is it just me?
// yendor
I'd like screenshots, there don't seem to be any in the article and it would be interesting to see is there are any changes or even a useable interface.
If anyone can point out some screenshots please post them!
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It could be coffe.... or it could just be some warm brown liquid containing lots of caffeen.
First, let's take the hardware. There is simply no hardware that is sold where the company will guarentee the uptime level that IBM does. It might not put out the MIP's per dollar that other systems do, but its I/O and redundancy (hot swappable everything)cannot be beat.
Secondly, the software which is developed now is not all ISPF/CICS/character mode screens. In our shop we have several applications which use GUI windows connecting to DB/2 over TCP/IP (yes, it is a Windows GUI, but that's another story). My application has just over 100 tables and is several hundred gigabytes in size, and is used by a call-center handling hundreds of inquiries a day. I challenge anyone to build a system that can match the performance and realiability that we enjoy with our current setup.
A good portion of the world's economy/business runs on mainframes, this wasn't some fluke chance.
Wasn't the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004, priced at $370 to convey the message that it could do 'anything' one of IBM's big machines could?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I don't think IBM's customers will like the new name. It contains one of those commie lowercase letters, and fails to include a dull-sounding number after the slash. How do they expect to get enterprise-class reliability with a name like that?
OS/380 might have been more appropriate - though even that is a bit racy.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
D'oh. It really helps if you reply to the right article, doesn't it? Moderators, please nuke...
Strange they didn't pick OS/365 as the next release indication the OS would work every day of the year with no downtime.
Help fight continental drift.
240Z - ~1972, 2.4 liter inline 6, 4 speed manual, no AC
260Z - ~1974, 2.6 liter inline 6, 5 speed manual, AC
280Z - 1975/6, 2.8 liter inline 6, 5 speed, AC
The 20 was by far the best looking.
The copper bosses killed you, Joe. 'I never died', said he.
For many thousands of years, mankind has been feeding plants with plants.
In recent years, we've taken a real shine to feeding animals to animals... even to those animals that are vegetarian.
The next logical step is, of course, to start feeding us to each other. Let's let marketing lead the way!
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SCO Unix is far worse than HP-UX or AIX, IMHO.
IIRC there is a 64-bit version of linux running on prototype 64-bit processors at Intel.
Duh, I forgot about the 64-bit linux already running on Alphas.
Okay, so the System 390 was renamed the "zServer" last year, and now they've renamed OS/390 "z/OS". Got it.
But at the same time IBM renamed the AS/400 the "iServer". Will they now call OS/400 "i/OS"? I suspect Cisco will have something to say about that.
Mainframes are surprisingly CPU-poor by Unix server and PC standards (or at least they were last time I looked) - but they generally make up for this with astonishingly good I/O capabilities.
Back when I was investigating Ingres on IBM mainframe Unix in the early 90s, I worked out that it could support perhaps 20 users, compared to hundreds with DB2 running on MVS (i.e. native mode not Unix). Ingres, like most Unix-based RDBMSs, assumed that CPU could be spent freely to save I/O (the best approach for mid-range Unix boxes), while DB2 assumed the opposite.
Anyway, the key point IMO is to choose a suitably I/O-focused application for Linux/390 - serving mostly static web pages would be fine, and CGI might be OK if you are using an efficient technique (e.g. Java with compilation to native code, or just very short CGI scripts in mod_perl), but generally any heavy computation should be avoided.
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Don't forget object-oriented, net-enabled COBOL to go along with it.
Ugh, talking about kicking a dead whale down the beach...
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
People somehow think that open source was magically invented a few years ago. From the 1960s through the 1990s, IBM supplied the COMPLETE source code to their operating system, compilers, libraries, boot loaders, EVERYTHING, to their customers.
The reason that a company would spend millions of dollars on a mainframe was not only because the hardware was faster. It was because the software was completely customizable.
While the Unix community, as it was, was struggling with incompatable binary releases, bugs they couldn't fix, vendors who came and went, leaving object code wreckage in their wake, mainframe programmers had organizations like SHARE, specifically designed to allow people to trade and share mainframe source code.
It wasn't truly open source, because the source code was only available to those organizations who had purchased IBM hardware, but only IBM hardware would run IBM software, so for all practical purposes, it WAS an open community.
IBM had a disasterous change of management in the early 1990s, and some idiot made an "executive decision" that IBM would stop releasing their source code. This was a move that effectively destroyed the OS/390 and VM codebase, and caused customers to leave IBM in droves. Because customers were no longer to be trusted to modify their own system source code, IBM threw thousands of programmers at the source code, trying to make it everything to everyone, so that no one would ever need to modify anything. The result is that VM is no longer a lean, mean operating system. Instead, it's a bloated mess, filled with poorly thought out interfaces that very few people even use.
So, in essence, you have it backwards. One of the main reasons that IBM was so profitable in the 70s-90s was because they DID make the source code available for "geeks" to toy with -- except that the geeks had titles like "Systems Programmer" and "Systems Analyst". And most of the major mainframe applications -- air traffic, banking, insurance, finance, were written in house, by those same "geeks" who were only able to write the software that powered the mainframe generation because they had access to the source code and the ability to modify it.
The engineers probably still call it OS/390, and dutifully ignore the marketdroids, as we should too.
:)
Actually, a lot of us still call it MVS
Finkployd
The question was asked, "[is] using z/OS is still like 'kicking a dead whale down the beach?'"
Probably not...OS/390 has been for a couple of years now Posix 4 compliant. That's one short certification step away from being a branded Unix.
Perl even builds out-of-the-box on OS/390. Well...you do have to configure config.h, but since OS/390 supports standard shells (eg, sh/ksh), that's a straightforward operation.
N. --
Yes, but it brings to mind a South American gentleman, wearing a white Panama hat, drinking a ZIMA.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Secondarily, and a bit more in detail: aside from not having to have a whole farm of servers, what are the upside and downside issues of running multiple images on one machine? Similarly, could multiple images of a BSDs (Net, Free, etc.) be run on a z/OS or 390 machine?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Hopefully it's not like "dynamiting a dead whale on the beach". That can get messy. A fine mist of whale hanging in the air, medium-sized gibs of whale falling at your feet, human-sized slabs of whale crushing cars, etc.
[insert references to petunias and Magrathea here]
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How many classes do you have to take
..!!in an intastella burst i am back to save the universe!!
> Not to start a flamewar of any kind but there
h tm l
> isn't a company I can think of who would dish > out cash for some huge mainframe-like computer > solely to let one of their geeks toy with, and
> install anything other than something proven
> (or semi-proven via marketing.)
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/12/07/1451230.s
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EOF
This was published by IBM some months ago, but this matches actual release of z/OS. From my reading on this there are a few differences between OS/390 and it's successor z/OS. Nothing earth shattering but some cool stuff.
1.) Software cost. On traditional mainframes the amount you paid depended upon the size of the machine. The larger the box the more the cost. To combat this most companies run there mainframes at a very high CPU usage. I've been at places where 100% usage on the CPUs are not at all uncommon. I believe with z/OS this will change and you will be able to purchase based upon usage of the software. This makes it a much more affordable for things like internet business where sudden spikes in usage cause problems. No you can buy a huge box but pay for a small CPU usage. If other mainframe software vendors (like CA) follow this lead it could be a huge reduction in software cost for businesses.
2.) CPU clustering. I believe OS/390 could only have a maximum of 16 CPUs. I've heard that z/OS can have up to 64.
3.) IBM is going trying to force the n-3 upgrade restriction again. Basically IBM releases a new version of the OS every 6 months. If you keep current on maintenance they will assist in an upgrade from any version 3 levels old. For example, if you are going to OS/390 R10 they will help if your current version is R7 or later. IBM always pushed this but Y2K made them make this a strong recomendation rather than a requirement. This is still going to be a tough sell because most companies don't like doing OS upgrades every 2 years.
4.) z/OS is designed to work on there zSeries processors to use all of the new features. I believe you can still run it on a later 9672 machine but you can't do all of the new stuff. That means most companies are going to be forced to buy new hardware and with Amdahl & Hitachi no longer selling IBM compatible mainframes, Big Blue is in a nice position. OS/390 R9 is the last release which will run on the old water-cooled bi-polar boxes. Everything now needs CMOS technology.
6.) 64 bit address spaces have improved. 64 bit was introduced in OS/390 R10 (if you run a new zSeries machine). This really isn't a huge deal to me. The biggest advantage will be DB2 and other databases who will no longer need to use hyperspace to store there data. The average program will probably never need 64 bit addressability (some don't need the current 31 bit addressability). I think the main benefit of the zSeries machine's support of 64 bit is for non-z/OS operating systems (like Linux). The really wierd thing is that you can have one LPAR running 31 bit and another on the same box running 64 bit. It's one line in your LOADxx member to switch back and forth.
7.) TCP/IP got another overhaul to, among other things, make it faster to communicate across LPARS on the same box.
8.) In either z/OS or OS/390 R10 Work Load Manager gained the ability to manage resources across different LPARS instead of just managing an individual LPAR. For those of you who don't know what Work Load Manager (WLM) is, it is a cool little tool that allows you to define what your business goals are and it will manage CPU consumption accordingly. For example, if you can say that you want 90% of a specific transaction to complete within 1 second and 99% of them to complete within 5 seconds. WLM will then increase & decrease CPU accordingly to meet your goals. If it can't meet the goals it will report saying that it's time for either a new box of for you to get realistic about your goals. Its a really nice tool.
There are others, but these struck me as the biggies.
Later...FJ
OK, so my theory is correct: you need SCSI to use Solaris/x86 properly.
;-(
It runs IDE drives in PIO mode, which kills a lot of the performance. Especially when your box only has 64 MB and things swap all the time
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
The wax guy?
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
> OS/390 was the OS for the IBM/390, and OS/2 was meant to be the OS for the PS/2. So the z/OS name is at least consistent.
No, if you apply the consistent interpretation you discover that it's an OS named "z" intended to be run on a machine named "OS".
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> sugest MS changes the name of Windows XP to Y OS.
I suggest Y/OY instead.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> Coincidence? I think not... (or is IBM trying to one-up Apple?)
It's not exactly like they're trying to compete in the same space.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> ...the OS whose creation inspireed Fred Brooks' book "The Mythical Man Month".
And Brooks was right: Even after all these years IBM still doesn't even have the name pinned down.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
OS/390 is *nothing* like unix or any other OS for that matter...
I was thinking of VM
Just park your car far away, stand back and don't breathe too deeply...
can you imagine a beowulf of theese???
:-)
What you say!! Not half. As I recall there was about 38K free in the bootup message, after graphics and BASIC and sprites. The pixel-addressable screen was something like 320x200 2-bit color (wild ass guess), which would be 16K for the graphics bitmap. Add in 8 sprites at 8 bytes each, I believe. God I miss sprites.
Maybe the Atari Jaguar was the first 64-bit OS. It said 64-bit right on the box.
the people with below average IQ ratings aren't smart enough to know it
You Like Science?
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You Like bottomquark.
Remeber to boycott:
Bayer
BASF
Ford
Shell
Standard Oil
Merck
And all subsidaries as well, seabiscuit.
-nme!
What was *mumble*?
Pretty sure the first 64-bit UNIX was UNICOS for the Cray X/MP, around 1983-1985 or so. Second was probably HCR's System V port to the Control Data Cyber 180, around '85. What was next? AIX? OSF/1 for the Alpha shipped in '93. Solaris didn't make it all the way until relatively recently. Not sure about IRIX or HP-UX.
"64-bit OS", on the other hand, doesn't mean much without a reason why precisely 64-bit machines matter more than earlier machines with long-but-not-64-bit words. And shit, I've got a 15-year-old calculator with a 64-bit OS (FSVO OS).
Actually, funny as it sounds, this is indeed the real reason for the name: before OS/360, mainframes where mostly special-purpose machines. In order to illustrate the fact that IBM's new mainframes could handle the "full circle of applications", they names it System 360. 360 degrees is a full circle. The next version was OS/370 (version numbers tend to increase), then came OS/380 and finally OS/390.
Actually, these machines need (at least) one hour downtime per year, in the fall, when they turn back the clocks... Indeed, the system clock is kept in local time rather than GMT, and thus the double occurrence of that hour when turning back the clock would hopelessly confuse the OS, which might then start some batch jobs twice. Easy solution: turn off the machine for an hour...
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UNIX - AIX
Their explanation of the name, at the time was Advanced Interactive eXecutive.It ran on a RISC box other than (prior to) the Power PC (Sorry -- don't remember the name), and it was badly broken at the time.They pretty much tried to rewrite UNIX from scratch with a bunch of mainframe stuff tacked on. Their intent was to create the best of both worlds (IBM-Mainframe/UNIX). I think that the initial version was more like the worst of both worlds. (I pronounced it "aches").
The more recent idea of running Linux under VM is probably far closer to the ideal. I'd love to get hold of a box where I could play with it.
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Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I'm still trying to figure out if the cute blonde I see at the weekly staff meeting is in marketing or in sales. :)
How we know is more important than what we know.
man, does everyone have to dis marketing people? They serve an important part of any business. If it wasn't for them marketing people who you think do nothing your company would not have any customers and you wouldn't have a job. That said, most the good looking chicks in any tech company are in marketing, another good reason to keep the anti-marketing-ism to a whisper.
How we know is more important than what we know.
"Seriously, I used TSO for years. Even after VM came along, it was mostly for office or network use. The serious engineering used batch simulation jobs on TSO, and our interactive graphics applications ran on MVS. (though not TSO)
Today, engineering happens on Unix, and office stuff on Windows. Kind of like the old MVS/VM roles, except that Windows doesn't carry the network role."
I guess it's a matter of perspective... To me, MVS was the 'office' OS. It was object-code only and ran all the boring financial applications.
VM, on the other hand, came with *source*, and was the lean/mean OS of choice for universities and small companies who wanted to do development (where there is value in 'virtual machines'!).
A.
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
If it wasn't for them marketing people who you think do nothing your company would not have any customers and you wouldn't have a job
Ah, yes, the sales people are useful. But no one ever accuses Marketing of "doing nothing." It's usually accusations of doing too much of the wrong thing. Most of the boneheaded things that a company does seem to come from the marketing department. There seems to be a lot of hubris in most marketing departments.
It's not as if "Marketing" hasn't earned their reputation over and over again by rushing product, lying about product, spending a zillion dollars on 6-color glossy ads for unfinished products while engineering lacks resources to finish them, calling up competitors and alerting them early to the company's new product, etc.
But Hey! They're beautiful people making beautiful things, and they know better than the engineers and finance people what should be going on.
I know of a certain marketing department for an ISP that designed the company website to work only with IE5.5+ and Netscape 6 with flash plugins. The whole thing was basically a powerpoint presentation. Fixed layout, annoying navigation, the whole package. When the engineers pointed out that they were effectively shutting out 20% of the company's customer base, and probably annoying the rest, the response was, simply, "we don't care; the website is for CEOs. They all have Windows with IE and want presentations."
Engineering produced a version of the website's HTML that was also backwards compatible in an afternoon, and forced marketing to use it.
Marketing should not run the show.
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Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I just had an IBM full-line presentation at work the other day, and the new 'z/OS' is just an evolutionary difference, kind of like just a new version of OS390.
Basically, this whole xSeries/zSeries/pSeries/etc is just a new name, it's not a real change in the product.
xSeries -- 'x' stands for 'x-architecture' which is their name for technology they've migrated from their mainframe line to increase the availability of Intel Servers. An example would be their 'lightpath' technology, which is quite nifty. Press a button, and an LED lights up next to failing components on the motherboard.
pSeries -- 'p' stands for 'performance.' Just a renamed RS/6000.
iSeries -- 'i' stands for 'integrated'. Same as the old AS400.
zSeries -- 'z' stands for 'zero downtime'. Same as the old S/390.
They're really just changing the naming. Why? Well, a good deal of it is that they want to differentiate the products and start getting some cooperation between server divisions instead of having them compete as much as they have in the past. The nomenclature very specifically positions each product in a specific market segment. x
Series is for when you need the efficiency of an Intel server but the high availability features of a mainframe. pSeries is when you need performance. Need solutions in a box? Go for the iSeries. Can't stand ANY downtime at all, ever? Go with zSeries.
Neither Trillian nor the Itanium are ready for prime time yet. The Alpha, and its OSes, are, and have been for years.
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Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
...could be exactly what is needed to help kick off 64bit computing - can anyone say 'open source'?
64 bit systems have been around for over a decade, and 64-bit Linux for at least 5 years. Ever heard of the Alpha?
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Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
I never really had a problem with Solaris/x86. I know that everyone says it sucks, it's insanely slow, it doesn't support any PC hardware, etc... but I had two systems running it quite successfully. One of them was a P233MMX with 64MB RAM and Adaptec Ultra SCSI, and the other was a dual processor 450 MHz Pentium III with 256MB RAM and Symbios Ultra2 Wide SCSI.
I can honestly say that the P233MMX was usable. I won't pretend that it was a speed demon, of course. My other system is always fast, no matter what operating system is loaded on it (even Win2K Advanced Server ran surprising well).
I'm planning on upgrading the memory to 512MB or 1GB soon, though. It's sort of sad, but 256MB isn't as much as it used to be.
Why don't you just uninstall Shockware support from your browser? Or install a proxy server like WebWasher or the Internet JunkBuster? They both run under Win32 and Linux.
I'm not sure what you mean. Are you saying that the world should give in to your desires and reshape itself so that you're never inconvenienced?
If so, then you're in for a rude awakening.
Wrong! The next one would have to be OS/420! You see, the last version was OS/390, the one before OS/360 ... 30 difference, so ... 420! (insert obvious HHGTTG-Quote here).
... "I am going to run ze OS on ze mainframe" ;-) (yea, so sue me, I'm a native german speaker myself)
And BTW, I think it's "the OS", as pronounced by a German: "ze OS"
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
OS/390 was the OS for the IBM/390, and OS/2 was meant to be the OS for the PS/2. So the z/OS name is at least consistent.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Just curious here. What do you have against Netware? What version? I just finished a network OS upgrade research project and came up with Netware 5.x as the winner over Linux (yes, go ahead and flame me) and Win2K. This was a small shop that already had a Netware box, um, a 3.11 box. I've ran Netware 4.x on a 3000+ user netwrok with over 75 WAN connections also. I rather like it for file/print and user auth. Certainly not for apps though.
Dive Gear
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
>
... but like the man said, it was possible to hack VM into something almost useable. At Clemson in the mid 70's we had a home-grown edit/batch-submit/output-view system that was about as interactive as you could get with 3270 terminals. The editor could squirt numbered source lines onto your screen, you could edit them there, squirt the screen back, and have your changes accepted in one gulp.
Depressingly like filling out forms in a web browser...
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
"Using TSO is like kicking a dead whale down the beach," said ... I forget who. It wasn't Ken Thompson, though. It was another member of the lab staff. Anyone remember who it was?
Problem is, they knew. That's the whole point. And an important difference between IBM and your hypothecical screwdriver manufacturer. IBM did customizations of their machinery to better fit its job, they did onsite-maintainance of the devices, which were often located right inside the concentration camps.
IBM's work was sufficiently appreciated by the Nazis that they awarded Watson a medal for his efforts:
Oh. I forgot to mention.
You can plug an Oc-30 into the back of a mainframe.
No more routers. No more switches. No more mazes of wiring. Can you imagine all the routers switches and wiring needed for a 500 node server farm?
Your ignorance is really showing through. The linux usage on mainframes isn't to maintain or increase uptime. It's to increase productivity.
ok, lets say you're running a 500 node linux hosting service on a mainframe. One of the nodes could crash (linux is less stable than mainframe). If it crashes, your hosting mainframe process quickly restarts the linux node in less than 10 seconds.
ok. lets say you're running a 499 node linux hosting service and you want to add another 4 nodes for a customer running web/database/other services. it would take about 10 seconds to create all 4 nodes. And the bandwidth in between nodes (say database and web) would be on the order of 10GigaBytes per second. Sorry. Your sun server farm just doesn't do this kind of thing
Everything you want to know about linux on mainframe. Its history, its purpose, its future. All from the horses mouth. The originator of linus on s/390.
It wasn't the first 64-bit OS, but it _might_ have been the 64-bit Unix. I was part of a team that port System V to *mumble* back in `89.
It was kinda painful, because the compiler didn't have a 16-bit datatype, which made the TCP header kinda hard; everything had to be bitfields.
In case you're wondering, sizeof(char) == 8, sizeof(short) == 32, sizeof(int) == 64, sizeof(long) = 64
- David
*mumble* was the Cyber 180. I did the networking utilities and a bit of kernel hacking in the streams stuff. It wrapped up in the fall of `89.
The easiest way to get an old HCR-hand to cheer is to show him Die Hard 2.
- David
...I was going to install BeOS on my new machine, but if I can have zOs... I mean, that must be 25 versions later, right? Same as my Windows 2000 was 1902 versions better than Windows 98.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
my english 12 teacher back in high school handed out a page of bad metaphors/similies which contained all but the last on that list.
wonder if it was the same list these were taken from.
-- Went home. Had to feed the kids.
Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interface(?) Code
I'm not sure about the I but the rst is correct.
----
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
Ah yes, thank you for your kind correction.
----
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
...when I read the name z/OS was something along the lines of, 'Are they running it on Z80s or something?'
Guess I'm officiallt an idiot now...
/Mikael Jacobson
"But surely we won't be still stuck with Linux in 25 years!?"
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
The only problem is what do they do with all those assembler programs which use bit 32 to indicate the end of an argument list?
Back in the good old days when men were men and sheep were scared the original 360 machine had 32 bit integers but used only 24 bits for addressing memory. Crafty assembler programers used the spare 8 bits to sneak pass extra information around with addresses. The most pervasive of these cheats was to use bit 32 to indicate the last address in a list of addresses. Almost every assembler subroutine ever written expects to be passed the address of a list of addresses in register one, and, they expect the last entry in the list to have bit 32 set to one.
This is why OS/390 always used 31 bit addressing rather than 32 bit addresses.
PS. mainframes don't neccesarliy wiegh in at two tons. The smallest machine which will run OS/390 is a PCI card which fits into a standard slot on a PC.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
I am just waiting for a book on how Bill Gates and microsoft were reponsible for the death of 6 trillion jewish hampsters.
Fact 1. Hollerith punch card machines were completely standard office equipment by the late 30s, the first standardised hollerith system was created for the US census of 1901(? I think.) the contract for a cheap handheld input device was awarded to the company which later became IBM. (The support for the Model 1 was dropped in the early eighties!)
Fact 2. Dehomag, along with all other German based companies regardless of ownership were required to follow directives issued by the various ministries in Berlin. They could have refused to supply equipment to the government but this would have resulted in the confiscation of the company be the German government.
Fact 3. Like it or not the Nazis were the internationally recognised and legally elected government of Germany. All companies were under an obligation to obey German law.
This all happened a long time ago and almost everybody involved is dead. If we could re-direct our efforts to preventing present day governments killing their citizens rather than re-vamping past attrocities for finacial gain the world would be slightly better place.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
I propose re revise the Linux name.
Linux Operating System Extended Revision
Err, perhaps not.
Rich
Um, well, there is already an OS/400, that's what runs the AS/400...it's heritage is system 36 and system 38, not sure if those were OS or hardware monikers. So, maybe they are trying to not confuse those who run AS/400s, by naming a new S390 OS in a confusing manner.
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
Does that mean it will run Zork III?
z-machine spec
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
You are quite correct about how the 360 was named however, there never was an OS/370 or OS/380.
360,370,390 refer to the hardware architecture.
The IBM operating systems blood lines went somthing like this.
Hardware: 360 > 370 > 30xx > 43xx > 9370, 9000 > Enterprise server/Gx > z900
These are mentioned in sucession because they have the same heritage.
Operating Systems: OS/360 > OS/MFT > OS/MVT > OS/VS1 > OS/VS2 > OS/MVS > MVS/XA > MVS/ESA > OS/390 > z/OS
TOS > PCP > DOS > DOS/VS > DOS/VSE > VSE/AF > VSE/SP > VSE/ESA
VM > VM/370 > VM/SP > VM/XA > VM/ESA > z/VM
-- Regards.
I believe that is a line from the Hitchhiker's Guide. A description of the Vogon ships if memory serves...
There's an interesting article on Linux Planet interviewing David Boyes (the man who had 41,400 Linux images running on a single mainframe using System/390.
DILBERT: But what about my poem?
Marketing is the reason IBM is changing (has changed) the AS/400 to be the iSeries 400, the RS6000 to be the pSeries, the Intel/NT/2000 boxes to be the eSeries, the 390 to be the zSeries, and I believe linux to be the xSeries. I am not 100% on which letters go with what when it comes to the p, e, and x, but I know the i for sure.
Nah. After the code merge with the Windows Millenium Edition code, it'll be called..... Windows: Y/ME *ducks and runs*
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
> Killed 6 billion people in such a short period?
Of course, this should be 6 million (actually even less than this, maybe 5)...
Donate free food to the hungry at The Hunger site.
You are welcome, but do I have to put a smiley after each funny comment? :-)
---6510 coder (8-bit) and proud owner of two C-64s
Donate free food to the hungry at The Hunger site.
The first 64 bit OS was that of Commodore 64's, wasn't it?
Donate free food to the hungry at The Hunger site.
If you don't like C, they have standard compilers for C++, Pascal, COBOL
Do they have a compiler for object-oriented COBOL, i.e. ADD 1 TO COBOL ?
Will I retire or break 10K?
>People at that time were the same as now, just doing their jobs, trying to make a living etc.
...
mmmm hmmm
Just following orders, right?
...so the Japanese car company admired the Germans for how they had risen from the ashes of the world war to have the most prestigous nameplate in America. They realized some words sounded "funny" to other cultures, so they sent a marketing team to the most successful PR company in Germany to come up with a name palatable to Americans.
The Japanese explained the situation to the Germans, who nodded and asked what time frame they had to come up with a name.
The Japanese replied, "We need by next Thursday."
"Dat soon?"
Oracle and unix guy.
The whole computing paradigm is shifting to small hand held devices like the MS TabletPC or the iPAQ.
The whole computing paradigm is not shifting to the small hand held devices. Only the appropriate parts - just as minicomputers shifted parts of the mainframes that were appropriate (and a bit that weren't) and microcomputers did the same to minis. Now palms are getting the subset of micros that are appropriate, and some things that are not. There is also a merger of other technologies (ie, phone/paging, distributed computing etc.), but, as the Boyce interview someone else linked pointed out, 70% of data is still on mainframes.
There will always be a need for large centralized databases, to think your gasoline billing, banking, medical or government records can or should be distributed across a bunch of little devices is ludicrous.
Paradigm addition, paradigm division, fine, but not paradigm change.
Oracle and unix guy.
The only problem is what do they do with all those assembler programs which use bit 32 to indicate the end of an argument list?
Use perl to fix it.
Oracle and unix guy.
A lot of this depends on the legacy of where you work, and what software is installed in what place. I was on TSO when it was the workhorse, and there wasn't a VM installation.
I was also the first user on VM in my area. I don't remember if I started with CMS 1 or 2, but I remember CMS3 coming in.
IMHO the 8.8.1 filesystem namespace stunk. Maclibs were a poorly-supported, gassy pain to use. At least with the 44(+8 with PDS) filespace of MVS, nearly all applications recognized the '.' and you could pretend you had hierarchy. I guess later versions of VM/CMS added a true hierarchical filesystem, but by that time I was headed to Unix, and didn't care.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
is of questionable value, when you're submitting a job that takes overnight or several days to run. We also had some good programs for viewing job output.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
How dare you criticize it. Nothing GUI about it, at all. No steenking Windows, no Mice, no Icons, no Pointers, not even any clicking, except for the old tactile-feedback keyboards.
Seriously, I used TSO for years. Even after VM came along, it was mostly for office or network use. The serious engineering used batch simulation jobs on TSO, and our interactive graphics applications ran on MVS. (though not TSO)
Today, engineering happens on Unix, and office stuff on Windows. Kind of like the old MVS/VM roles, except that Windows doesn't carry the network role.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
but seriously, it doesn't matter a damn what they call it since the people who will be buying it know what it is underneath and won't be swayed by a name.
We had OSF/1, Digital UNIX and Tru64... and god knows how many more variants of that!
Cheers... .*shrc is
--
$HOME is where the
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
Well, since we are ranting about os's, and you felt the need to slam Solaris x68, I will then go ahead and plug it.
Personally, I haven't found a better os for x86 than Solaris. It does need extra RAM (I use 256 MB) but it runs great on a Celeron 300 and I find the software to be well-engineered. It would be nice if it had more software support like the SPARC version, but oh well. If that was all I cared about I would use Windows :-)
Granted, I haven't tried BSD beyond a brief time with FreeBSD, and I never tried BeOS, but I have used MVS and OS/390 and on the Whale Scale there is no comparison!
Only the lazy operators do it that way. The official way is to keep the system clock in GMT and just change the local time offset twice a year--no reboot required. See bit.listerv.ibm-main where this gets rehashed twice a year.
Quis metamoderunt ipses metamoderatores?
OS/390 is one of the worst things I've ever worked with. I can only say one thing, anything new is welcome on these machines.
What's wrong with it? I know the 8 character limitation is ludicrous, but apart from that what?
The thunder was ominous-sounding, much like the sound of a thin sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a play.
Isn't this a line from a Terry Pratchett book?
Just like the US and UK arms industry have sold weapons to some seriously nasty governments: Iraq, Indonesia (used in the largely unreported ethnic cleansing of the East Timorese) and China, and they're still doing it. I have yet, however, to see any real publicity of this but yet I still keep seeing people suing companies for crimes committed nearly 60 years ago by people who are now dead or extremely old. The Holocaust was a terrible thing, but so was the ethnic cleansing in East Timor. Where's the balance here?
But that's just a character set. Hating mainframes surely requires a better justification than that. Anyway modern mainframes recognise ASCII quite happily, you just have to tell it to.
The firewall is running on old Sun and SGI machines. I don't know whether either of the 2 corps had anything to do with the firewall itself, but it wouldn't surprise me since there are dollars involved.
oh, never mind.
---
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Would you hold Volkswagen responsible for what its executives did in WWII as well? The slave labor and everything? I wouldn't; the current management didn't even know about it until they looked into it and they now have a memorial to their slave workers somewhere on their corporate campus. I could go on, but I don't wish to get modded down because of a rant. /Brian
And Trillian?
/Brian
ps For those not paying attention, that's Linux for IA64/Itanium...
So? It's still 64-bit and therefore relevant. (Actually, UltraSPARC Linux comes to mind as well...)
/Brian
z/OS is just a silly marketing name for what was previously called OS/390. Which is itself a silly marketing name for what was previously called MVS. Which it itself a silly marketing name for what was previously called by another name I don't remember (OS/VS perhaps ?). IIRC, at one point it was even called OS/370. I believe that the first incarnation of this OS is OS/360, the OS whose creation inspireed Fred Brooks' book "The Mythical Man Month". Ask a mainframe specialist.
Don't forget that IBM is a marketing company as much as a technical company.
What was next? AIX? Ummm...AIX went 64bit in 1998 with release 4.3
....There is nothing a Cattle Prod and a foot length of 7/8" satellite coaxial can't fix/
More details on z/OS here.
This is what Linux wants to be when it grows up :)
Good bedtime reading !
Whenever I've been forced to use some version of IBM's OS/3X0 I understood that OS stood for Obstacle System.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
man, does everyone have to dis marketing people? They serve an important part of any business. If it wasn't for them marketing people who you think do nothing your company would not have any customers and you wouldn't have a job.
.sig - This is going to be the largest RIAA, MPAA, DMCA, WIPO protest since Seattle. The problem is a hollow democracy, instead of community, growth and democratic participation we get marketing - dong like it? See you in Quebec City.
Lets take all the useless lies, propaganda and VanillaBS(TM)®© spewed by Marketing/Advertising people and liberate their time for more useful efforts. Those useful efforts may be childcare, eldercare, reading to children - or other real value efforts.
I look around at the human/material waste associated with 'advertising' and am sickened... after 2000 years of recorded history we have to create an entire profession of liars to corrupt reality with lies from capitalists.
Why not free the marketing people and allow them to become artists and teachers? Why the hell do we need _another_ full page glossy telling us that "brand X is better than Brand Y because it is FJDKJSLKJ" - sheer utter useless crap.
Why do Marketroids exist? Why are they enslaved to be mouthpieces of undemocratic multinationals? Read
Surely that would hurt your foot, and by the time you actually moved the damn thing anywhere, it would be pretty smelly too.
I can't think of any OS that hurts your foot and smells....but I'll admit to never having used OS/390.
Are there any other OSes that have these properties?
Tom.
Oh arse
The huge ships hung in the same way that bricks don't.
Or has someone already used that in some great literature?
-- The universe began. Life started on a billion worlds...
-- Except on one where stupidity was there first.
OS/380? I've worked with IBM mainframes for
years and I never heard of OS/380. You're right
about the derivation of OS/360, though. They
were kinda stuck after OS/390, I guess, since
OS/400 was already taken...
Chris Mattern
Here is a quote from the article: "The new operating system also has better support for Sun's Java software and Linux, two technologies that make writing software for a mainframe easier for modern programmers" Either I am missing something, or the author doesn't quite get it. How does one operating system have better support for another? When he said operating system, did he really mean z900 (S/390)?
There is a long tradition of this sort of thing. My PhD project involved wasting lots of time on Usenet. The only major problem with this was that it was not particularly original: most other grad students were doing similar things.
friday, Apple comes out with OS X
monday, IBM comes out with Z OS
Coincidence? I think not... (or is IBM trying to one-up Apple?)
Kurdt
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
"z" reminds me of those Nissan sports cars, z-280 z-240 , 300-zx etc... Those z-280 types are pretty old (70s) and were like one of the first Japanese attempts at sports cars I believe... In some weird retro way I find them extrememy cool, I mean owning a new Porsche is nice, but it's so cliche yuppie scum-ish. I would prefer a nice 60-70s Mercedes or BMW.
First of all, why aren't manufacturers of screwdrivers blamed for the killing of jews in WW2 ? I mean I bet the Germans greatly benefitted from having screwdrivers when they were building concentration camps.
Secondly, the "evidence" that this book gives is very thin, there are a lot of assumptions made but the writer doen't have any hard evidence. Here in Europe the book wash trashed in newspaper reviews as subjective and badly researched...
Thirdly, it seems to be a trend that every company that ever had anything to do with WW2 gets bad publicity these days and off course demands for compensations. I know that what happened to the Jews in WW2 was evil beyond comprehension, and I fully agree to the principle of comapnies that profited from that compensate the victims etc. But that doesn't mean that every single company that ever did business with the Nazi regime was evil and can be partly held responsible for the holocaust... If they knew what was going to happen with their stuff, sure then they might be blamed, but how many people expected that 8 million Jews would be killed in concentration camps before say 1942 ?
I don't like this trend of trying to divide things into good/evil black/white etc. People at that time were the same as now, just doing their jobs, trying to make a living etc. Sure if they knew they were aiding the destruction of 8 million people they would have refused to do their work, but I don't think they did know.
For all I know Microsoft Access could have been used for aiding the "etnic-cleansing" that has recently been going on on the Balkans, does that give anyone the right to say that Microsoft aided in this process without giving detailed evidence ?
IBM is surely missing the boat here then. The whole computing paradigm is shifting to small hand held devices like the MS TabletPC or the iPAQ. Are there any plans on porting the z/OS to these platforms? It's really a wonder how IBM has stayed in business all these years with such a conservative outlook. People want mainframe functionality on their iPAQ, after all this is the year 2001...IBM had better wake up and smell the coffee.
Yours,
Bob
All the best,
--Bob
instead of using the letter "z" they should have used the letters "FL" so we would have "FLOS". That way users would have a clean feeling in their mouths at boot-up.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Another problem with marketing is spewing out stuff that looks nifty as opposed to providing real information (gee...maybe the mktg. department should speak with the engineers every now and then?) A better example...marketeers developing products instead of developers, and then the engineers being tasked to "Make it so"
For IBM, you might be right. :)
Will the real Bruce Perens Please Stand Up
Well, yes, of course I'm silent around the marketing chicks.
:)
(good thing the don't read slashdot.
Will the real Bruce Perens Please Stand Up
IBM supports their OS for large-scale business rollouts, not for the consumer. This shouldn't make much of a difference in practice.
Ooo, they call their new version something else. Like, say, Win2k instead of NT5, or "MacOS X" instead of Rhapsody.
The engineers probably still call it OS/390, and dutifully ignore the marketdroids, as we should too.
Will the real Bruce Perens Please Stand Up
Besides the previous mentioned linux on Alphas, ever heard of Solaris? It runs on 64 bit processors called UltraSparcs. And on top of that you can order a CD with the source code! What will they think of next?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
From the referenced article:
/. header said. It is just an update and a name change.
The new version of the operating system, formerly called OS/390
See guys, it isn't a new OS like the
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
eek, I had to setup a 3270 connection on a rs/6000 for a missouri police agency to be able to check on warrants...man was that a huge pain in the ass...and what a rediculous system to be using in this day and age...
terradot, growing awareness
Analogies You Probably Won't Find in Great Literature:
The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.
The man fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty Bag filled with vegetable soup.
From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and "Jeopardy" comes on at 7 p.m. instead of 7:30.
Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze.
Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center.
Bob was as perplexed as a hacker who means to access T:flw.quid55328.com\aaakk/ch@ung but gets T:\flw.quidaaakk/ch@ung by mistake.
Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.
The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
The thunder was ominous-sounding, much like the sound of a thin sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a play.
George Bush was like Albert Einstein at this stage
ereh kcilc
360 degrees of Karma
Operating systems such as z/OS fall in place where others aren't neccessarily useful. The OS is geared mainly (or it seems) for high powered computing, something along the lines like a huge mainframe, which OS' like Linux, or the BSD's cannot be trusted to support.
Not to start a flamewar of any kind but there isn't a company I can think of who would dish out cash for some huge mainframe-like computer solely to let one of their geeks toy with, and install anything other than something proven (or semi-proven via marketing.)
Sure it may be biased on the geek level to discriminate against other Unixes but the fact remains money talks, and the companies using this OS and the servers they run on would be insane to let it happen at this point especially when Linux in my opinion is in such a disarray of distro's. there are no standards on many things, etc.
Take a look at Motorola, they're power computing comes in the form of QNX, ChorusOS, Onea OSE, Integrity, ThreadX, for many high powered stuff. Are these less of an OS than Linux or any other open source based OS out there because its not "geek chic?" Hell no.
AntiSpam Info
360 degrees of Karma
First Linux for the S390, now this. Is IBM trying to hard on behalf of the S390 ?
yes.
Wow. I was duly impressed -- there's a giant shockwave, animated ad in the middle of the page. I thought Ziff-Davis was horrible before, but they have managed to hit a new low!
Anyone on modems should just avoid the page
Let's hear it for zd!! Personally, I'm never going to look at ZD content again, at least not until i can filter out those ads.
(Dammit. Enter should not simply submit from the subject line.)
I heard about a Navy security request for tenders to wipe date from sensitive systems. They got back a bunch of quotes, one week, one day, several days. Then they got a quote of ten minutes. When they queried how this was to be done, the reply was, 'explosives'. There next query was, 'can you do this any quicker'.
Microsoft - Where would you like to go today, Maybe Jail?
not trying to be rude or anything... but if I had made that comment... I'd probably change my slashdot username. That kind of remark could follow you around for a long long time.
Casual Games/Downloads
...could be exactly what is needed to help kick off 64bit computing - can anyone say 'open source'?
if ibm were to open source it, wouldn't someone take the respecting parts and jam it into linux or bsd and tada - ibm have a version of linux with all their special parts that they've previously coded for their own use yet is up do date as your 2.4 kernel. free as in beer too!
i was angry:1 with:2 my:4 friend - i told:3 4 wrath:5, 4 5 did end.
i was angry:1 with:2 my:4 friend - i told:3 4 wrath:5, 4 5 did end.
i was 1 2 4 foe i 3 it not 4 5 did grow
Pulling a few threads together...
I've worked on IBM mainframes for nearly 15 years, and I don't ever remember MVS being called OS/MVS, it was just MVS, pure and simple. None of this fancy "OS" stuff?
(By the way, who was the first company to call its operating system a name with "OS" in? Surely not Apple, with Mac OS 8?)
When I started, we were already using System 370 (and I heard the explanation that this was an extension of the "full circle" System 360), and MVS was probably MVS/370 at that time (but I'm a little hazy).
I don't recall hearing of S/380, just MVS's mutation through:
One of these - XA? - introduced a 31-bit architecture.
And then along came OS/390, fully formed from the waves, with MVS at its core, plus what was called OpenEdition MVS and later came out of the closet as UNIX System Services. (But the OMVS acronym is embedded in the operating system software.)
Clearly, the logical next name (counting in steps of 10) would have collided with the AS/400 operating system name, so something new was called for... A complete rebadging of the hardware side. All machines are now e servers, in different series... and there is logic behind the letters (at least some of them).
So, logically, AIX should become p/OS; OS/400, i/OS; and ptx, x/OS (not OS X!)
But it's not going to happen...
To show the world that the direction of IBM's mainframe software is making a dramatic turn of 360 degrees.
--
Same here. I've been using Solaris 8 for x86 at home while I study for my Solaris certification, and I'm quite pleased with how it performs. Much of the high end stuff is not available, such as the Sun Cluster product, but at least Solaris DiskSuite and Oracle 8i are available at no extra charge. I've also been using some Linux at my job at the FBI, and I'm pretty impressed with the wide range of software available.
Don't forget object-oriented, net-enabled
COBOL to go along with it.
[IF] CHAR " PARSE ASM" ENVIRONMENT? 0= [IF] : 2CONSTANT CREATE SWAP , , DOES> DUP @ SWAP CELL+ @ ; [ELSE] DROP : 2CONSTANT CREATE SWAP , , DOES> ;CODE
0 0XB PUSH,
1 CELLS [4X0] 40X MOV,
NEXT,
END-CODE
Of course, it's easier to optimize if there are 64 actual bits available to address each instruction. The point is although 64-bit processors are great, there are a lot of other factors to consider when reviewing processors (or operating systems running on the said processors for that matter).2DUP * ;