Absolutely, but did you ever try to use any of that ? Back then /everything/ was a special case and everything needed to be programmed as such. This is litera

Absolutely, but did you ever try to use any of that ? Back then /everything/ was a special case and everything needed to be programmed as such. This is literally why JCL is a nightmare. The genius of Ken & Dennis was to boil all the special cases down to one simple abstraction. (Look at the socket API to if you want an example what happens when people dont understand the importance of sticking with the dominant abstraction.)