The best way to address potentially transient URLs in wiki may be to quote the relevant text as part of the citation. If I could find a reliable online secondary source, that would be better due to wiki's prejudice against primary sources.
Back when they were still available, I used to read the logic manuals for things that should have been in the reference manuals, and I used to read the code for things that should have been in the logic manuals. I still remember when IBM rewrote some logic manuals as HIPO manuals that were missing what the letters satood for, and the appalling VSFORTRAN documentation. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of Tony Harminc [t...@harminc.net] Sent: Thursday, April 14, 2022 11:23 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Reliable source for OCO? On Thu, 14 Apr 2022 at 07:37, Seymour J Metz <sme...@gmu.edu> wrote: > I'm editing the wikipedia [[Operating system]] article, and another editor > has challenged the sentence "The logic manuals for their contemporary > descendants, z/VM, z/VSE and z/VM, are not available to the general public." > What are the relevant URLs for IBM's policy? Thanks. The OCO (or more subtle) status of current software is in the announcement letters. Using IBM URLs as a reference is a bit of a trap, because IBM so frequently removes and rearranges things, and seems to have a global robots.txt that prohibits pretty much everything. It's not obvious to me that the existence of published logic manuals aligns with the OCO status of a product. IIRC many products that were not OCO have still had logic manuals withdrawn in favour of "diagnostic guides" and the like. At the same time some of those diagnostic books are remarkably detailed, and the logic is described or can be inferred even though the source code is not available. I also seem to remember some discussion of this on this very list, including the definitions of terms like "restricted materials of IBM", "object code only", and so on. I'm not finding them in a quick search, but one thing that did come up is a 2018 post from Gabe Goldberg, who said he had "my OCO file -- a decade or so worth of material documenting IBM's folly removing source code ("Object Code Only" for those who didn't live through it). " Might be worth contacting him. I'm not sure he's still active on this list, but g...@gabegold.com looks to be current. Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
