On 23/08/13 21:50, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
Quite frankly, from what I've seen most Windows users would find Linux
simpler than one of the *freely* *available* IBM OSes (i.e. MVS, VM/360
"sixpack" and so on).
To avoid ambiguity: that was a typo, and I meant "VM/370 'sixpack'".
As background: it appears that IBM didn't embed copyright notices in the
source or binary of their early operating systems, with the result that
older versions of the DOS, OS, and VM lines are now described as being in
the public domain. There's a hobbyist community that runs these under the
Hercules emulator, IBM is aware of this but generally keeps its distance.
All of these date back to the era when addresses (certainly per-process, and
usually system-wide) were 24 bit, i.e. there was a process or system
restriction of 16Mbyte of "core". Unfortunately, GCC can't compile itself in
16Mb, so somebody's created a patch for the Hercules emulator and for the
operating systems which allows one program at a time to allocate storage
from "above the line", this is referred to as the /380 hack
http://mvs380.sourceforge.net/ and hardly anybody's happy about it.
What relevance does GCC have? The fact that there is an environment in which
it may not work isn't regarded, by me at least, as unfortunate.
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