RE: Think before you buy...

["Farmer" <pharmer@domain.elided>]

Steve Stegmann [mailto:stegmann@domain.elided] wrote:
> I didn't know there was anyone on the list who heard of MVS. I know people
> who actually think TSO is a user friendly system. Gives me the shivers to
> just think about it.
> Has anyone built a debugger for MVS or do they still use "test mode" and
> core-dumps.

That's where I learned programming.  Again, in some ways it was like IH:
big, reliable, powerful in its own way, non-glamerous...

About 1987 a product named "Expediter" came along (later bought by
Compuware), which was like any modern debugger.  *Except* you could run it
backwards & forwards.  So, when a huge system would crash, we would
replicate the software & data to a test box and then run the program within
Expediter until it crashed.  They we would have the data & variables to look
at.  Way better than anything I saw on any other platforms in the 80s.

Another thing I liked about MVS is the reliability.  The machines never
crashed.  Until the last few years you really didn't have that kind of
reliability out of Unix boxes.  The toolsets weren't on Unix, etc.  I've
always had headaches with Alphas.  But the IBM SP2 I ran stayed up without
crashing for months (and it consisted of 10 parallel RS/6000s).  The Sequent
I recently worked on wasn't that reliable, but wasn't too bad, the HP & Sun
were fine.

Then there's NT.  Microsoft recently released a bug report that announced
that there is a bug in NT that causes it to crash after about 31-37 days.  A
patch is coming out.  The funny thing is that nobody was aware of *that*
bug - because all the other bugs kill it within a few days on average.

But, as far as Intel goes - they are about the only CPU maker left.  Their
profits are so huge, that they have a much bigger R&D budget than anyone
else.  And, they are frequently outselling *much* better CPUs.  Here's an
example: Sequent uses them in their big parallel NUMA servers, instead of
their own RISC-based design like HP.  The CPUs aren't nearly as fast as the
HP ones, but they are far cheaper.

To me MS & Intel are like the big three.  A cartel, or a monopoly.  Sun
isn't much better - it wants to join the club.  Even IBM & HP seem benign by
comparison.

Ken Farmer
1980 Scout II
1975 Travelall
1974 Travelall
1998 AMD 350 running win/98, to be soon upgraded to NT 4.0
1996 AMD 133 running linex