I shall mourn its passing, but not for long. There was a very good article in Datamation more years ago than I like to remember entitled: "The hidden speed of ISAM".
In the late days of MVT, someone collected around forty different ways of breaking into key 0. When MVS came out I got regular reports on how many had been closed off - the ones that hung around the longest were ISAM tricks. More recently the Germans said: "ISAM is langsam, VSAM is grausam." The two JCL parameters (long obsolete, but still tolerated) that I found confused many people were SEP= and UNIT=SEP= (and of course the corollaries UNIT=AFF and AFF= These days the W3 people used the term "deprecated" for such old rubbish. -- Phil Payne http://www.isham-research.co.uk +44 7833 654 800 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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