IBM, UNIVACSPERRY, BURROUGHS, and friends. Compare 1138

wrote, in part:

JCL is absolutely appalling, from what I've heard.

Basically, the problem is that to run a program takes multiple command lines; what, in UNIX, would be

then another line for "program" - in which you state how much memory you wish to reserve for the program. This can be mitigated through something called "compiled procedures"; basically, a batch file can be set up for each program one wishes to make it not insanely inconvenient to use.

The environment I am accustomed to in the mainframe world is IBM hardware with the *Michigan Terminal System* running on it.

While UNIX has subdirectories, MTS has line files. Text files can be treated as composed of 256 printable characters; record boundaries are not indicated by character combinations, and so there is no problem with mixing character data and binary data in files; thus, A format in FORTRAN produces no strange and unexpected results, and can be used to make compact data files without having to specify the files are of a special database type.

In a number of other ways, MTS was easy and natural to use. Also, unlike UNIX, it was oriented to the big-endian, case-insensitive, carriage-return (not line feed!!!) from terminals to end a line world.

When the Macintosh came out, therefore, my thought was that first one should try to get command-line interfaces to catch up with MTS before trying something much more advanced.

John Savard