charl...@mcn.org (Charles Mills) writes: > Somewhat OT but why? Why not C on the mainframe? Why two code bases, one > fairly easy to debug and one relatively hard to debug? > > I am thrilled with writing software for the mainframe in C (C++ actually) > after years of laboring in assembler.
the los gatos vlsi lab was using metaware for a lot of (mainframe) vlsi tool development. two people from the group then di mainframe pascal compiler ... which eventually evolved into vs/pascal product. I was working on getting one of the people (responsible for mainframe pascal) to do C language front-end ... when he left and went to work for metaware. when the palo alto group was planning on doing BSD unix for mainframe, I talked them into contracting with metaware for the C compiler. However, before that mainframe BSD unix shipped, the group was retargeted to PC/RT ... eventually coming out with "AOS" (bsd unix running on pc/rt) ... but still using metaware's c compiler. the disk division eventually sponsored the posix support on MVS ... one of the many things they were doing to try and get around the stranglehold that the communication group had on the mainframe datacenter (most of which the communication group vetoed ... since the communication group had strategic ownership for everything that crossed the datacenter walls; disk division being hdqtrd in silicon valley possibly helped with their perspective) misc past posts mentioning disk division talk at annual, internal, world-wide communication group conference that started out with the statement that the communication group was going to be responsible for the demise of the disk division (the communication group stranglehold was already resulting in data fleeing the mainframe datacenter to more distributed computing friendly platforms). http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#terminal a co-worker that helped with the original CMSBACK (eventually morphs into today's TSM) ... misc. past posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#backup ... left and did a lot of consulting for various silicon valley chip shops. At one place, he did a lot of work and enhancements for the AT&T C compiler (and some number of other vendor C compilers) for their operations on mainframe (as part of porting BSD vlsi tools to the mainframe). At one point he was doing a lot of work doing mainframe ethernet support as part of supporting SGI graphics workstations for displaying VLSI designs. The salesman dropped in and asked him what was going on and after being told, the salesman suggested that he should be doing token-ring support instead (or otherwise the customer might find mainframe support and maintenance suffering). Afterwards, I got a phone call and had to listen to several hours of comments about the company, local branch office and salesmen. The next morning, the vlsi company had big press release that they were moving off mainframe to servers. -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
