Where should the type information be: in tags and descriptors 466

Eh? It was perfectly usable from line-mode terminals, as was MVT-MVS, and I used it that way.

The majority of the evolution has been in the mindsets of the users. 30 years ago, we would never have regarded anything so ghastly as unacceptable. That is why I predicted that MS-DOS would fail :-)

There were several CMS and MVS front-ends that provided good interfaces, of which the one that involved least modification of MVS was Phoenix. The command language and utilities was as flexible as Unix, in different ways, which is not surprising given the common ancestry.

The person for MVS was the effort to maintain it, but what most people miss is that it was no more effort than maintaining a large Unix (or almost certainly Microsoft) server today. The reason that fewer people do the 'same' job today is that we don't - we stagger from disaster to bypbutt to temporary (read: permanent) lash-up to simple prayer and back again. And we don't even INVESTIGATE 90% of the bugs - it boggles me that modern kiddies can waste a day because of a completely broken component and not feel that it has any bugs in it.

I won't comment on the xt-370 project, except to say that most customer reaction was "why?" The official response was "customer demand", but I never did discover which demented suit was demanding it. A more agile and later project might have worked but, knowing some of those kitchen sinks, I can see that adding them would finish anything.

Regards, Nick Maclaren.