6 ms·

I'm curious - are there any features of System/360, that we don't have in modern operating systems, that would be worth implementing?

by porlw 4y ago

ghaff 4y ago
Presumably, most anything worthwhile would still be in Z/OS from whence it would have pretty naturally made its way into IBM's Unix and eventually Linux. OS/360 was quite different from most modern operating systems--most notably it was batch and designed for very small memory sizes--but different isn't really better in this case.
dtagames 4y 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.
- rbanffy 4y 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.
  - ngcc_hk 4y 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.
    - ibiza 4y 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.
  - dtagames 4y 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!
jonathaneunice 4y ago
Channelized I/O, intent-based security policies (e.g. from RACF), multi-layered error handling and recovery. It's a rich garden. However, it's not as simple as "implementing a feature," since the interesting things are all systems of activity with interlocking assumptions and expectations with all the other systems. You can't "just" pluck pieces out of context any more than you can grab a cool phrase from Mandarin or Urdu, or admire a lobster's claw and decide to graft it onto your own arm. But for anyone interested in evolving systems/OSs, definitely study S/3x0 and Z successors, or the proprietary mainframes and minicomputers in general. In many cases we are now stumbling into reinventing techniques that mainframes or minicomputer teams built many years earlier. Best case in point probably virtual machines (VMs), in which VMware et al started in ~2003 rebuilding a technology capability that had been developed in Z systems in 1967/68.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  ELI5: What is "channelized" I/O? How does it differ from, say, handing off I/O to a DMA controller?
  - trasz 4y ago
    It's something between that and RISC-V minion cores.
    - zozbot234 4y ago
      Your hard drive probably has a RISC-V core in it anyway. It seems like a distinction without a difference.
      - monocasa 4y ago
        The channel I/O format has conditional jumps in the command stream and lets you as the application programmer offload large parts of the filesystem or database directly onto the hard drive controller without main CPU intervention. It's closer to GPU command submissions than what you see out of NVMe/SCSI/ATA. So, for one example, telling the controller to "walk an index tree in this format and retrieve the block that matches this key" is something you can code yourself in the channel I/O command stream as it's own sort of ISA.
trasz 4y ago
I've looked at it only briefly, but... From my (mostly Unix-ish) perspective z/OS looks a bit like as if MS-DOS have been continuously developed by a few hundred people since the eighties. There are some nice things, but the overall system architecture is somewhat... nonexistant.
MichaelMoser123 4y ago
the EBCDIC encoding/character sets, however i don't know if it's worth implementing... (well, all terminal emulators have that)
- rbanffy 4y ago
  All IBM emulators, at least.

I'm curious - are there any features of System/360, that we don't have in modern operating systems, that would be worth implementing?

by porlw 4y ago

I'm curious - are there any features of System/360, that we don't have in modern operating systems, that would be worth implementing?

ghaff 4y ago

Presumably, most anything worthwhile would still be in Z/OS from whence it would have pretty naturally made its way into IBM's Unix and eventually Linux. OS/360 was quite different from most modern operating systems--most notably it was batch and designed for very small memory sizes--but different isn't really better in this case.

dtagames 4y 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.

rbanffy 4y 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.
- ngcc_hk 4y 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.
  - ibiza 4y 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.
- dtagames 4y 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!

jonathaneunice 4y ago

Channelized I/O, intent-based security policies (e.g. from RACF), multi-layered error handling and recovery. It's a rich garden. However, it's not as simple as "implementing a feature," since the interesting things are all systems of activity with interlocking assumptions and expectations with all the other systems. You can't "just" pluck pieces out of context any more than you can grab a cool phrase from Mandarin or Urdu, or admire a lobster's claw and decide to graft it onto your own arm. But for anyone interested in evolving systems/OSs, definitely study S/3x0 and Z successors, or the proprietary mainframes and minicomputers in general. In many cases we are now stumbling into reinventing techniques that mainframes or minicomputer teams built many years earlier. Best case in point probably virtual machines (VMs), in which VMware et al started in ~2003 rebuilding a technology capability that had been developed in Z systems in 1967/68.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
ELI5: What is "channelized" I/O? How does it differ from, say, handing off I/O to a DMA controller?
- trasz 4y ago
  It's something between that and RISC-V minion cores.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    Your hard drive probably has a RISC-V core in it anyway. It seems like a distinction without a difference.
    - monocasa 4y ago
      The channel I/O format has conditional jumps in the command stream and lets you as the application programmer offload large parts of the filesystem or database directly onto the hard drive controller without main CPU intervention. It's closer to GPU command submissions than what you see out of NVMe/SCSI/ATA. So, for one example, telling the controller to "walk an index tree in this format and retrieve the block that matches this key" is something you can code yourself in the channel I/O command stream as it's own sort of ISA.

trasz 4y ago

I've looked at it only briefly, but... From my (mostly Unix-ish) perspective z/OS looks a bit like as if MS-DOS have been continuously developed by a few hundred people since the eighties. There are some nice things, but the overall system architecture is somewhat... nonexistant.

MichaelMoser123 4y ago

the EBCDIC encoding/character sets, however i don't know if it's worth implementing... (well, all terminal emulators have that)

rbanffy 4y ago
All IBM emulators, at least.