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This is very much an IBM-centric narrative - it doesn't mean that it's wrong but at the time there really was an IBM world and an everyone else world - IBM care

This is very much an IBM-centric narrative - it doesn't mean that it's wrong but at the time there really was an IBM world and an everyone else world - IBM carefully tended to its walled garden, to the point of getting people fired who might consider looking outside of it - the result is people who knew nothing about IBM, and people who knew nothing but. Which essentially means that there are going to be different stories about 80x24/5 from that time - probably all of them correct in context. (oh and the console monitors on our Burroughs 6700 mainframe had delay lines while the user block terminals - TD830s - had dram and micro-controllers - there's another non-IBM/non-DEC world view of essentially the same technology)

lokedhs 7y ago
This is still true to this day. I have spent some time playing around with MVS (precursor to z/OS, IBM's mainframe operating system) on an emulator, and it's been a very educational experience. The first thing you notice is how everything is different. While the rest of the world was standardising on what a "file" was (a sequence of (not necessarily 8-bit) bytes) as early as the 60's, the IBM world has "datasets" which are rigidly formatted sequences of records. The differences doesn't end there, and extends as far as terminology, referring to booting as IPL and disk drives as DASD. When reading documents abd tutorials written by people who seemingly has worked with IBM systems for a long time, it also seems that while they know everything about how to operate z/OS, they are very ignorant of even basic features of "traditional" operating systems (which these days means Unix and Windows). I was reading a discussion about Revedit, which is an editor that is popular on MVS, and it was praised for being incredibly advanced. I've used it, and compared to the other one I have access to (whose name escapes me) it sure is better. But, the editor lacks a lot of functionality even the simplest of editors on Unix had (regexp, for example) and the fact that no one in the mainframe world seems to miss it suggests to me that people who work in the mainframe world simply don't think about computing in the same way as people who were raised on Unix. I'm not suggesting that one approach is better than the other. I think there are things that each side could learn from the other. But right now I only see the mainframe side learning from Unix, and very little going the other way. I probably will never work with mainframes for real, but learning how they work had been very helpful. It would probably help the industry if more people tried that.
mattrp 7y ago
Well yes to this - in the 80s you were either System V or whatever crap IBM was selling back then! :) Ps I always assumed 80x24 was a teletype (eg. tty) standard or at the least a two-by 80x12 punch card layout. I also wonder if the serial cable throughput to the terminal played a role..
- tgv 7y ago
  I think RSX, RT-11 and VMS would like a word.
  - mattrp 7y ago
    Sorry I was being intentionally controversial. I had both Unix and vms accounts as a student and I guess the vms never really resonated with me...
    - tgv 7y ago
      Don't worry. I never liked it either. When I found Unix, I was sold. I think it was the pipe (in the shell) that did it.
      - mattrp 7y ago
        For the longest time I had my systems cat Syslog to an lpr... anytime someone did something, I’d hear a bzzzzzt. Usually about 5 times a day. Maybe a dozen. Then one morning I came into work and there was a whole box of paper on the floor and the printer is still bzzt, bzzt, bzzt... it was a hacker who had decided to follow some instructions he found on the web and hack my system. Every time he’d do something he’d erase his steps... but he never checked to see that all his movements were being printed!
  - Taniwha 7y ago
    And all the other mainframe operating systems ... Most of the other big mainframe companies tried to emulate IBMs walled garden each had their own OS, their own (incompatible) networking system, their own compilers etc Unix was great mostly because it was simple and you could port it to new hardware ... Prior to that it was in no hardware manufacturer's interest to release their OS into the wild, that didn't sell mainframes. Unix also released a generation of frustrated systems people who were not allowed to write kernel code unless they worked for a mainframe company

lokedhs 7y ago

This is still true to this day. I have spent some time playing around with MVS (precursor to z/OS, IBM's mainframe operating system) on an emulator, and it's been a very educational experience. The first thing you notice is how everything is different. While the rest of the world was standardising on what a "file" was (a sequence of (not necessarily 8-bit) bytes) as early as the 60's, the IBM world has "datasets" which are rigidly formatted sequences of records. The differences doesn't end there, and extends as far as terminology, referring to booting as IPL and disk drives as DASD. When reading documents abd tutorials written by people who seemingly has worked with IBM systems for a long time, it also seems that while they know everything about how to operate z/OS, they are very ignorant of even basic features of "traditional" operating systems (which these days means Unix and Windows). I was reading a discussion about Revedit, which is an editor that is popular on MVS, and it was praised for being incredibly advanced. I've used it, and compared to the other one I have access to (whose name escapes me) it sure is better. But, the editor lacks a lot of functionality even the simplest of editors on Unix had (regexp, for example) and the fact that no one in the mainframe world seems to miss it suggests to me that people who work in the mainframe world simply don't think about computing in the same way as people who were raised on Unix. I'm not suggesting that one approach is better than the other. I think there are things that each side could learn from the other. But right now I only see the mainframe side learning from Unix, and very little going the other way. I probably will never work with mainframes for real, but learning how they work had been very helpful. It would probably help the industry if more people tried that.

mattrp 7y ago

Well yes to this - in the 80s you were either System V or whatever crap IBM was selling back then! :) Ps I always assumed 80x24 was a teletype (eg. tty) standard or at the least a two-by 80x12 punch card layout. I also wonder if the serial cable throughput to the terminal played a role..

tgv 7y ago
I think RSX, RT-11 and VMS would like a word.
- mattrp 7y ago
  Sorry I was being intentionally controversial. I had both Unix and vms accounts as a student and I guess the vms never really resonated with me...
  - tgv 7y ago
    Don't worry. I never liked it either. When I found Unix, I was sold. I think it was the pipe (in the shell) that did it.
    - mattrp 7y ago
      For the longest time I had my systems cat Syslog to an lpr... anytime someone did something, I’d hear a bzzzzzt. Usually about 5 times a day. Maybe a dozen. Then one morning I came into work and there was a whole box of paper on the floor and the printer is still bzzt, bzzt, bzzt... it was a hacker who had decided to follow some instructions he found on the web and hack my system. Every time he’d do something he’d erase his steps... but he never checked to see that all his movements were being printed!
- Taniwha 7y ago
  And all the other mainframe operating systems ... Most of the other big mainframe companies tried to emulate IBMs walled garden each had their own OS, their own (incompatible) networking system, their own compilers etc Unix was great mostly because it was simple and you could port it to new hardware ... Prior to that it was in no hardware manufacturer's interest to release their OS into the wild, that didn't sell mainframes. Unix also released a generation of frustrated systems people who were not allowed to write kernel code unless they worked for a mainframe company