As the owner of the TSO/E plan at the time, I was stunned when SHARE
told us this was the top priority for TSO/E. We pushed back. We said
"what about longer IDs that map into the 7-character namespace instead"?
"What about these other TSO/E requirements"? But those who maintained
this was #1 stood firm, dissents outside IBM seemed few and far between,
and we ultimately did it. The kicker was, if I recall correctly,
recurrent audit exceptions from those whose security policies require
user IDs of eight or more characters.
That the change had so little fallout is actually a testament to the
effectiveness of our change notification process to IBM development and
other software vendors. (This change set a new record for affected
components, as it happens, shattering the old one by a factor of at
least two and perhas has high as four.)
Ed Jaffe wrote:
On 7/21/2018 10:40 AM, Charles Mills wrote:
FWIW I think there was pressure from shops with 8-character IDs elsewhere
who wanted consistency on z/OS.
Not saying it was a good idea, or a bad idea, just sayin' ...
No. It was a desire for consistency *within* z/OS. I cover this change
beginning on slide 42 of my "z/OS V2R3 User Experiences" SHARE
presentation. Here's a link to the slide deck for the most recent
incarnation from Sacramento:
http://share.confex.com/data/handout/share/130/Session_22307_handout_11384_0.pdf
In summary, eight-character userids were supported by MVS 4.2 way back
in 1995. That support extended to every subsystem and environment across
the stack (the BCP, RACF, JES, CICS, DB2, etc.) with one exception:
TSO/E. The design of the old TSO account file -- which long predated
RACF -- led to an unfortunate decision to restrict TSO userids to seven
characters. After 22 years, that restriction was finally lifted in 2017
with z/OS 2.3 TSO/E.
--
John Eells
IBM Poughkeepsie
ee...@us.ibm.com
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