Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
...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...
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.
--
...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....
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!
--
It could be coffe.... or it could just be some warm brown liquid containing lots of caffeen.
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...
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.
--
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
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]
--
How many classes do you have to take
..!!in an intastella burst i am back to save the universe!!
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
The wax guy?
--
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
OS/390 is *nothing* like unix or any other OS for that matter...
I was thinking of VM
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...
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.
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.
- - - - -
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.
...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?
--
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.
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});
"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?
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.
...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?
I propose re revise the Linux name.
Linux Operating System Extended Revision
Err, perhaps not.
Rich
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?
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.
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?
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!
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?
Upsides:
1) You can plug an OC-30 into the back of one. No need for routers.
2) Central administration. You can admin those hundreds of web sites from one VM session.
3) Far lower power requirements than all those boxes.
4) Incredibly fast I/O, whipping all contenders out of sight.
Downsides:
1) A potential single point of failure. However, this is highly unlikely, since mainframe uptimes tend to be measured in years rather than months.
2) Unix people will keep using the word 'antiquated'.
3) IBM might screw it up (see MCA, SNA, APPC and OS/2) although they definitely deserve the benefit of the doubt here.
As to your other questions, if Linux and AIX fit, then there's no reason whatsoever (apart from IBM not being interested or being unable to find a wealthy benefactor) that the BSDs couldn't be ported. zSeries is the same architecture as S/390, therefore VM will run and therefore will be able to run multiple Linux partitions.
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.
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
More details on z/OS here.
This is what Linux wants to be when it grows up :)
Good bedtime reading !
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
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 ?
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"
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
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
Hardward like the Tandem non-stop and Sun E10000
and any other fault tolerant system does hot swappable anything. Granted they lifted
the idea from mainframes but they are the new(ish)
kids on the block who know all the tricks....
To show the world that the direction of IBM's mainframe software is making a dramatic turn of 360 degrees.
--