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by dtagames 1540 days ago
The new "Z on demand" features they offer over the internet remind me a lot of how it easy it was to provision virtual S/360 (S/390 at the time) hardware and software with VM/CMS when I worked there in the 90's.

It's taken since then to get that on the PC.
1 comments
rbanffy 1540 days ago
I've been playing with VM/370 and MVS 3,8j on Hercules for some time, but I haven't figured that out yet. The concepts are so alien for a Unix person I may have gone over the instructions a couple times, without recognizing them as such.
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ngcc_hk 1540 days ago
Try moshix YouTube. He is good. Not beginner. At least you know what we are after.

Btw still think ispf is a great editor. Slimv vim with linux/macOS is better as lisp is better.

Cobol and 370 assembler is so 1960s. Both are 60s technology. And in fact car and cdr from ibm mainframe, not this arch?

But slime and ispf make some bearable.

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ibiza 1539 days ago
Agree on ISPF being a great editor. It was trivial for new users to pick up, but at the same time had a rich feature set.

My favorite part was its support for folds, or what it called "excluded" lines. You could issue an initial command that excluded lines you wanted to ignore, and then issue subsequent commands to operate on lines not excluded, or "NX". Very nice. I occasionally wish I had ISPF while I'm in the middle of a Vim session.

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dtagames 1536 days ago
The most fun thing in VM/CMS is REXX. It's an awesome language invented by Mike Colishaw with the express goal of being easy to program above all other considerations. Its PARSE instruction is one of the most powerful things I've ever seen in any language.

REXX was so great it became the standard scripting language for all IBM system products and was incorporated into the OS command line and the text editor, XEDIT. This meant you could have one language that ran commands and programs in any other language, could do anything at the command line (like create machines, etc), and could edit and save text files. Think about that for a second. It was WAAAAY ahead of its time.

Sadly, REXX predated the internet and never had a browser-savvy release. A miscarriage of REXX and OOPS called Object Rexx was also unsuccessful.

But it was an amazing tool for its day!

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