TSO replacement

from melinda's

By the time we celebrated VM-370's tenth birthday at SHARE 59 in New Orleans in August, 1982, IBM had declared VM strategic, and the number of licenses was growing wildly. Our installations had already begun to enjoy some fruits of IBM's new commitment to VM, such as XEDIT, the enhanced file system, and Pbutt-thru. Although IBM had been to SHARE to discuss the possibility of distributing only object code for its software, the general view was that it would soon realize how unwise that was. In 1982, the VM community had a lot to celebrate. Most of us believed that CMS was about to take over the world, so we gave it a wonderful birthday party.

And we soon got a very big reason to celebrate. Early in February, 1983, IBM announced VM-SP Release 3. After years of pleading, we would finally get REXX!

Mike Cowlishaw had made the decision to write a new CMS executor on March 20, 1979. wo months later, he began circulating the first implementation of the new language, which was then called ``REX''. Once Mike made REX available over VNET, users spontaneously formed the REX Language Committee, which Mike consulted before making further enhancements to the language. He was deluged with feedback from REX users, to the extent of about 350 mail files a day. By consulting with the Committee to decide which of the suggestions should be implemented, he rather quickly created a monumentally successful piece of software.

VM customers fell in love with REXX the moment they got it. REXX quickly became the language of choice for CMS applications. In no time, we began seeing REXX applications consisting of hundreds of thousands of lines of code, and few of us wanted to work in any other language.

By the time REXX celebrated its tenth birthday in 1989, it had been designated the SAA Procedures Language and had long since begun spreading to other systems, including MVS. Today, it is available on essentially every significant platform and continues to delight more users

.....

some postings about large rex app done spring of 81 (I had then done a Share presentation on it ... one of the points in the early days of the OCO wars ... was that if it ever shipped, it would have to ship with source):

some postings about coming up with 3-tier architecture and having to deal with saa folks

lots of postings about internal network

--