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Hello World on z/OS

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Re: Hello World on z/OS

#31

Post by JdeBP »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #14

> IBM uses special and completely unintuitive names for basic concepts…. because OF COURSE THEY DO. As I recall, it's called "Bluespeak", and that sort of thing is pretty common actually. I was educated in networking at a Cisco netacad, so I use Cisco terminology that is apparently not universal. Programming languages do this too for some reason: Sum type, tagged union, discriminated union, variant...

The point that M. Bellotti came close to, but missed, is that "of course they do" is because every field has jargon. The error here is in thinking that one set of jargon is intuitive and normal whilst another set of jargon is "special and completely unintuitive".

The simple truth is that there are many people to whom jargon such as "WIMP", "ISOs", "flat UI", "IIFE", "DOM", "pull request", and "UX" is equally as opaque and foreign as "DASD", "APAR", "SRC", "PMR", and "PTF" (http://jdebp.info./FGA/fix-terminology.html). All are in fact niche terminology.

Re: Hello World on z/OS

#32

Post by floatboth »

dralley wrote: post #21
mattzito wrote: post #16

The mainframe infrastructure is both the core feature and showstopper bug of the platform. On the plus side, it has empowered countless core business applications to scale years, even decades, beyond their original development lifecycle. On the negative side, it has created a stagnant cult of mainframe “priests” who oversee a platform that most businesses would rather get rid of, if they could only figure out how. My…

One of my older coworkers told me that IBM used to have a travelling mainframe demo in the back of a truck. As part of this demo, they would start a big computation, and then reach into the mainframe and start pulling out RAM and entire CPUs straight from the sockets, while the thing kept right on computing.

ZFS developers like to do this with hard drives :) But how did IBM do that with RAM? Do mainframes have… redundant RAM? Like literally sticks mirroring others?

Re: Hello World on z/OS

#33

Post by nine_k »

This is a nice reminder about how one feels when one meets a piece of technology for which one's intuition can't offer anything useful, many "common sense" assumptions end up incorrect, and you don't even know the right words to feed to a web search engine.

I'll try to memorize this feeling, and remember it every time I try to explain something technical to people outside that field. Maybe it will help me explain better.

Re: Hello World on z/OS

#34

Post by dralley »

floatboth wrote: post #32
dralley wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my older coworkers told me that IBM used to have a travelling mainframe demo in the back of a truck. As part of this demo, they would start a big computation, and then reach into the mainframe and start pulling out RAM and entire CPUs straight from the sockets, while the thing kept right on computing.

ZFS developers like to do this with hard drives :) But how did IBM do that with RAM ? Do mainframes have… redundant RAM? Like literally sticks mirroring others?

Apparently, they can. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent...

But that was only introduced in 2010, so either the timeframe I was guessing at is wrong, or I'm misremembering what component it was. Could have been disk drives maybe.

Re: Hello World on z/OS

#35

Post by tony-allan »

wolfgke wrote: post #13
api wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not interested in anyone but people willing to write million dollar plus checks using their products. Those same giant customers have large legacy investments and plenty of money to hire teams of people to deal with things that are hard to use. Those kinds of customers care much more about things working for 30+ years without downtime than they care about UX. There's a whole world of solid, reliable, but unbe…

> There's a whole world of solid, reliable, but unbelievably boring "institutional computing" out there that hackers usually don't touch because it's... well... boring. I can imagine if the salaries would be sufficiently (i.e. very) high and the complete culture would not be openly hostile towards the values of the hacker culture, I can easily imagine that hackers would be willing to touch it.

(1) These systems were built from the ground up with security in mind.

(2) Mainframes are usually buried deep within an organisation behind many firewalls.

I would love to see a z/OS system at a Defcon conference. After all Windows and MacOS seem too easy these days.

Having said that, I found this... "Follow me on a journey where we p0wn one of the most secure platforms on earth." Quite a cool presentation (https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2025/DEF%20CON%2025%20pre...) with a good mainframe intro.

IBM zEC13 technical specs: • 10 TB of RAM • 141 processors,5 GHz • Dedicated processors for JAVA, XML and UNIX • Cryptographic chips...

Re: Hello World on z/OS

#36

Post by landbeyond »

Hilarious! (disclosure: I am a mainframe systems op/dev)

The best part is where they didn't know about the INSERT key. I can understand z and ISPF being a hassle if you're used to modern computing but the mainframe logic is actually logical, and probably predates whatever modern stuff you're on to... like "files". :)

Re: Hello World on z/OS

#37

Post by JdeBP »

Softly wrote: post #27

Missed my favourite part of learning the mainframe: where the enter key is. Return and enter and two different keys, but, on most modern systems, they perform a similar function. On z/OS Return moves down a line (similar to Tab, but ignoring all entries on the current line) and Enter actually sends to data off. Once you get used to it, it's really no different to the Linux or Windows command lines. It's certainly dat…

> on most modern systems, they perform a similar function.

Interestingly, Ctrl+Enter is conventionally different to Enter.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16898262

Re: Hello World on z/OS

#38

Post by JdeBP »

landbeyond wrote: post #36

Hilarious! (disclosure: I am a mainframe systems op/dev) The best part is where they didn't know about the INSERT key. I can understand z and ISPF being a hassle if you're used to modern computing but the mainframe logic is actually logical, and probably predates whatever modern stuff you're on to... like "files". :)

You mean the letter-a-going-up key.

* https://superuser.com/questions/290814/

Re: Hello World on z/OS

#39

Post by tCfD »

dralley wrote: post #21
mattzito wrote: post #16

The mainframe infrastructure is both the core feature and showstopper bug of the platform. On the plus side, it has empowered countless core business applications to scale years, even decades, beyond their original development lifecycle. On the negative side, it has created a stagnant cult of mainframe “priests” who oversee a platform that most businesses would rather get rid of, if they could only figure out how. My…

One of my older coworkers told me that IBM used to have a travelling mainframe demo in the back of a truck. As part of this demo, they would start a big computation, and then reach into the mainframe and start pulling out RAM and entire CPUs straight from the sockets, while the thing kept right on computing.

Were they pulling out compute resources they knew in advance were not being used or part of the active partition for that particular job? Or did they let potential customers do the pulling themselves?

Re: Hello World on z/OS

#40

Post by teh_klev »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #14

> IBM uses special and completely unintuitive names for basic concepts…. because OF COURSE THEY DO. As I recall, it's called "Bluespeak", and that sort of thing is pretty common actually. I was educated in networking at a Cisco netacad, so I use Cisco terminology that is apparently not universal. Programming languages do this too for some reason: Sum type, tagged union, discriminated union, variant...

> IBM uses special and completely unintuitive names for basic concepts

Once upon a time I worked as a (young) field engineer looking after mostly Intel based kit, peripherals and Novell/Windows/Unix OS support. Our company was subcontracted to look after a bunch of Perle controllers for another maintenance company that didn't have engineering staff locally (these were on two and four hour onsite must-fix contracts). Perle manufactured a range of clones of IBM's 5294/5394/5494 Twinax remote access controllers that you plugged stuff like 5250 series terminals and printers into.

Anyway, I had to go on a training to course to learn about the gear, usual faults etc. But I also had to learn the IBM lingo such as asking the remote ops folks to "VARY ON" and "VARY OFF" (i.e. enable/disable) controllers when working on them. There were other, now long forgotten, incantations you needed to utter over the phone to IBM ops folks when on site, but the VARY ON/OFF one stuck with me.

As an aside, I also ended up looking after and field repairing a bunch of System/36's[0], in particular replacing hard disks which looked like:

http://www.corestore.org/5360-13.jpg

Amazingly a sole engineer could carry out this task in about 30-40 minutes with no need for extra hands. These were well thought out and designed workhorses.

[0]: http://www.corestore.org/36.htm

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