Speaking as someone who had to do a lot of work with these machines in college (and one job after grad school until I found something else), I think the author’

Speaking as someone who had to do a lot of work with these machines in college (and one job after grad school until I found something else), I think the author’s main problem is that they are insistent on using ISPF. Nobody I knew in either place would touch the thing, it was universally hated. We all did our editing locally, used FTP to transfer files to the mainframe, and created datasets and compiled our code by submitting pre-written JCL that older and wiser sages had composed for us.