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Hello World on z/OS

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Re: Hello World on z/OS

#2
I demember doing virtualisation/containerisation for Linux on various platforms (including s/390 and z/VM but also VMware and Xen) at IBM. No matter what the platform was, the PMs would refer to the VM/container as an 'LPAR' (logical partition). Fun times.

Re: Hello World on z/OS

#3
IBM is a special company that seems to not want anyone to use its products. They sure go out of there way to make things hard to access. But they keep them around forever. Happy to sell them to the right customer. So many overlapping products that don't make sense in aggregate. The company seems to be marketing-driven the last 10+ years, selling all manner of snake oil.

Possibly the worst big co in these factors?

Re: Hello World on z/OS

#4
The reason why things are the way they are on mainframes, and how you should think intuitively, becomes a lot clearer once you realise that they are a long-evolved version of the very first mechanical punched-card processors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_record_equipment

In fact, I'm almost willing to bet that the foreignness of mainframes to the average developer is due to mini/microcomputers having become dominant and taken a very different evolutionary path; Linux and DOS/Windows have far more in common with each other than mainframe OSes, despite their huge differences, because they evolved from mini/microcomputers and UNIX.

Re: Hello World on z/OS

#5

The reason why things are the way they are on mainframes, and how you should think intuitively, becomes a lot clearer once you realise that they are a long-evolved version of the very first mechanical punched-card processors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_record_equipment In fact, I'm almost willing to bet that the foreignness of mainframes to the average developer is due to mini/microcomputers having become dom…

Sure, that's certainly important to keep in mind. But that doesn't mean IBM shouldn't invest in usability.

Re: Hello World on z/OS

#6

IBM is a special company that seems to not want anyone to use its products. They sure go out of there way to make things hard to access. But they keep them around forever. Happy to sell them to the right customer. So many overlapping products that don't make sense in aggregate. The company seems to be marketing-driven the last 10+ years, selling all manner of snake oil. Possibly the worst big co in these factors?

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 unbelievably boring "institutional computing" out there that hackers usually don't touch because it's... well... boring. Java is the closest most hackers ever get, and that has more in common with Python or Ruby than COBOL or z/OS. Java is kind of a modernized mini/micro computer business language.

Re: Hello World on z/OS

#7
In the 'Allocate New Data Set' screenshot, it says - for the expiration date field - that the formats are 'YY/MM/DD, YYYY/MM/DD, YY.DDD, YYYY.DDD in Julian form, DDDD for retention periods in days or blank'. (I added some commas, which I assume are supposed to be there, but are just line breaks in the screenshot.)

Does that mean z/OS supports the Julian calendar?

Re: Hello World on z/OS

#8
This article brings back some happy memories! Well done Marianne.

z/OS, TSO, JCL and the rest are different to what most people are used to but this is where modern IT started, where virtualisation, high availability and serious backward compatibility were invented.

Peel away the layers of technology is a large company and you will often find a mainframe managing the core data of the business.

Re: Hello World on z/OS

#9
post #7

In the 'Allocate New Data Set' screenshot, it says - for the expiration date field - that the formats are 'YY/MM/DD, YYYY/MM/DD, YY.DDD, YYYY.DDD in Julian form, DDDD for retention periods in days or blank'. (I added some commas, which I assume are supposed to be there, but are just line breaks in the screenshot.) Does that mean z/OS supports the Julian calendar?

YYYY.DDD is the year and the day within the year (1..365)

Re: Hello World on z/OS

#10

The reason why things are the way they are on mainframes, and how you should think intuitively, becomes a lot clearer once you realise that they are a long-evolved version of the very first mechanical punched-card processors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_record_equipment In fact, I'm almost willing to bet that the foreignness of mainframes to the average developer is due to mini/microcomputers having become dom…

Sure, that's certainly important to keep in mind. But that doesn't mean IBM shouldn't invest in usability.

They and others have.

There are ways to develop in Eclipse that can target z/OS.

https://developer.ibm.com/zsystems/documentation/java/jzos/j...

https://www.ikanalm.com/solutions/devops-and-toolchain-orche...

However, the people who develop for z/OS are often people who are familiar with Interactive System Productivity Facility (ISPF). It's a bit like whether people who are proficient in Vim or Emacs really benefit that much from an IDE.

There is also a unix shell with a z/OS interface:

https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/zosbasics/com.ib...

But again, the people who program mainframe learn it through that environment. It would be interesting to hear from people who have used these sorts of set ups.

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