[SunRescue] Tape drive

[Ken Hansen]

MVS is a fabulous environment. It is not a place to hang around and tinker,
but every tool you would want *for peoduction work* is available.

You need deep pockets to run MVS - the software licenses are *huge*.

CA got to be the third largest software house in America by buying up all
the available mainframe software houses they could (like the one I used to
work for, OnLine Software - sigh),and then milked the maint. fees - 15% of
purchase price *each year*.

Their customer support is horrible, their own software "inhales deeply," and
the folks that care run kicking and screaming out of the shop when CA comes
calling.

I had customers that were really pissed off when they found out my employer
was being bought by CA. They had just gotten rid of all their previous
CA-owned software for our stuff, then we got bought. We (OnLine Software)
were sold off not because we were a failing enterprise, but because our
owner/founder wanted to persue a medical degree (he had been running the
company while in his first year of medical school when CA approached him (or
vice-versa)).

Oh, back to MVS. It is designed and maintained by folks in a money is no
object world - they have been crafting this environment since before I was
born (I was born 1964, OS/360 was released in 1964). The IBM 360 family was
the first to *feature* backward compatibility = previously, users had to
rewrite their code for each new (faster) machine that came along.

*in theory* OS/360 software from 1964 *could* run on a mainframe running the
latest MVS release.

MVS is an OS, not an interface, not a collection of utilities, but an OS -
it manages an awesome amount of hardware in an extremely efficient manner.
MVS is old school - it is optomized for the hardware, not the operator.

But hey, the PC on my desk at work is cool too ;^)

Ken
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan Debertin" <airboss at nodewarrior.org>
To: <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Sent: Sunday, May 20, 2001 10:50 PM
Subject: RE: [SunRescue] Tape drive


> On Sun, 20 May 2001, Brian Dunbar wrote:
>
> > HAH!  I'm a 2nd generation computer guy.  My dad (about to retire) runs
a
> > VMS system at American Airlines (wait, I mean Sabre, or now, EDS) in
Tulsa.
> > He's always looked at Unix/NT/Novell as toy operating systems.
>
> Those are strange conversations to have, aren't they? My dad says the same
> things about Unix, but I have to take that with a big grain of salt, given
> that the company in question is an enterprise customer of HP ;).
>
> Anyone ever used MVS? He seems to talk about that OS as the be-all,
> end-all of stability. I have never seen it, but it's apparently still in
> use at ... hmmm, should I say? Well, they make airplanes :D.
>
> Dan
>
> --
> Dan Debertin
> airboss at nodewarrior.org
> www.nodewarrior.org
>
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