Where should the type information be: in tags and descriptors 465

On Fri, 08 Apr 2005 00:33:22 GMT in alt.folklore.computers, Peter

More comparable in basic functionality and approach to TOPS-10-20; but with full protection supported so that production users could each run protected under their prod MVS VM, separated from MVS developers running a separate instance under their devt MVS VM, separated from system programmers running a new VM release under their VM; 0.1s; more of a Unix daemon approach to services running in their own VMs, but with lower CPU, faster I-O; shell (exec2) comparable to Unix sh, shell escapes were the natural way to run another program, within whatever program you were using; editor comparable to emacs without the bloat, some of us lived in it from logon to logoff, used as a TUI by many programs and utilities, as a file manager, mail program, had an editing mode that produced patches directly instead of altering files; make and patch approach the automatic builtin way to develop software, required for both VM and CMS; also emulated OS-MVS and DOS-VSE so their utilities could be used to develop programs and they could be tested under CMS, but no JCL support, CMS commands allowed the emulator environments setup as if for a job step.

So no, nothing like CP-M or DOS, although CP-M borrowed some device independence ideas, concepts, and approaches, as well as the name.

First did screen font editing, used a spreadsheet (with 16MB), displayed charts and graphs, all in colour, used HP (GL-2) plotters, mono dot matrix printers; OS-2 graphics were ported CMS graphics.

Would have been about 2MB for a VM-SP system, but that really depended on the size of app you wanted to run, 4-16MB was usual per CMS user, VM kernel code was about 64KB, but memory required for OS tables depended on total memory size, and heavily on number of devices, normally hundreds (mainly terminals, then disk paths), could be thousands (redundant paths from CPUs, to controllers, to drives could rapidly explode device counts).

Don't forget that current mainframe OSes have had 40 years of continuous evolution, and if you claim usable Windows as an *OS*, then desktops have about 15.

-- Thanks. Take care, Brian Inglis Calgary, Alberta, Canada

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