Greg Pruce of the IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> wrote on 06/26/2010 01:00:32 AM:
>> Ed Finnell wrote: >> >> In a message dated 6/25/2010 5:31:07 P.M. Central Daylight Time, >> [email protected] writes: >> >> with Bruce Leland, the original author, for about 25 years. >> >>>> >> Author(s) Mike Smith and Bruce Leland. >> > > Big bloke with the red hair? Steve Smith. Most of the original > ISPF interface was his work. > > I remember his presentation in 1990 when using PDS as a > "workbench" was being encouraged. His pitch began > "Now, I don't know what your idea of a workbench is, but..." > and he showed a slide of a backyard shed workbench > covered with as astonishing degree of clutter. > > I think he meant to imply that PDS offers lots of features > and facilities. > > Cheers, > Greg > Here is an excerpt from the PDS doc, presumably written by Steve Smith. "The first goal of the ideal work bench is to provide within easy reach those things the programmer uses all the time. Key strokes should be reduced. Reentering object names should be nearly eliminated. The user should be able to keep several activities going at one time. He should be able to apply any number of tools at any time to the things he is working on. Another goal of the ideal work bench is to provide several ways to narrowly target the objects and data that are important to the programmer. This reduces the background clutter and allows the programmer to concentrate on items of interest. This would help alleviate the information overload we all experience. Another goal of the work bench would be to provide better ways to get the right information about objects for display. This includes information not available through common utilities. It would combine and present common information on objects in ways that enhance the understanding of this data. The work bench would integrate a great many tools for processing information and also provide affective interfaces to the excellent tools provided by others. Many of these tools would be applied to individual objects or applied in mass automatically. The work bench should provide an easy way to add user supplied tools. The work bench would reduce or simplfy many of the maintenance chores we have to live with. Compressing and copying data would be easy. Means for converting data formats would be part of the copy process. The ideal work bench should really shine when it comes to handling problem situations with datasets. It would isolate and identify these problems and provide a corrective procedure. Much of the information that might be extracted by a work bench product may be useful for outside processing. The work bench would provide ways to capture information and put it into user files useful for other processing." ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
