A thought that came to my mind when I read David Boyes' posting is "why
shouldn't IBM have stopped CMS development?". I say this with the
background of 40 years of IBM mainframe sysproging and almost 30 years
of being a VM sysprog. I will add to the IBM background, an MBA from
the UofC so I also have some background in business. How much would it
have added to IBM's bottom line if people had continued to use XEDIT and
other CMS based programs rather than switching to a PC? IBM would have
had to have come out with a Full Screen version of CMS that really was a
good/better alternative to MS Windows. How much would that have helped
the bottom line?
Perhaps to partially answer the question I originally posed, rather than
having to educate the new VM people, just eliminate the need for them.
If there is no CMS based app's and a new release were a lot easier and
new userid's, whether a LINUX or a TPF system, were just a new lpar that
could be defined with a command to the LPAR hypervisor, who cares about
CMS?
The license fee for the base VM/OS to IBM is still there. There is no
CMS development cost. IBM hardware sales keep on going? Gradually all
of us old people get out of the business. As an IBM stock holder and
retiree, I'm happy.
Jim
To be blunt: because IBM is not-so-gradually killing CMS's ability to
host application workload by means of starvation. No VSAM, no updated
compilers other than C, no tooling that is not absolutely necessary to
maintain CP equals no capability to continue to host commercial
applications. The writing is on the wall.=20
Ultimately, I'm trying to answer the question: if you have CMS-oriented
users today, where are they going to go? How are you going to get them
there? We've got plenty of evidence that TSO certainly isn't it. What
are your choices, and how do you salvage as much of the existing
already-built-and-paid-for business logic as you can?=20
I'd rather start working on answers to these questions *before* I have
to do it in an emergency fire-drill mode. I think it's fair to ask IBM
to help us find those answers if they're going to break our toys, so I'd
like to tell them what we need so they can work with us to find an
answer.=20
--
Jim Bohnsack
Cornell University
(607) 255-1760
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
