On 5/20/09 11:56 AM, "David L. Craig" <d...@radix.net> wrote:
> I must be missing something here. Shops that had it before > IBM decided to drop support (because there weren't any problems > to resolve) will continue to get it as they upgrade VM, but > new shops cannot get it for love nor money? As long as you licensed the product before it was withdrawn from marketing AND keep paying the maintenance fee, you can continue to run any IBM product forever and ever, amen. Don't expect IBM to fix it if it breaks, and unless you pay them a healthy amount of money, they will stop taking support calls after a while. You won't get any new distributions, you just retain the right to continue running it as long as it will still run and as long as you can figure out how to install it on whatever new version of the OS might come along. One shop I worked at ran the VM/370 1401 emulator for well over 20 years after IBM withdrew it from marketing, faithfully paying the maintenance charge year after year. It would have cost a fraction of that price to just rewrite the darn application, but Not In My Control.... > Please, someone, > explain the rationale behind this. What are new shops supposed > to use instead and are existing shops expected to migrate to > that at some point? There is no replacement, other than to write a VSAM-compatible library that uses the native CMS filesystem interfaces in assembler or C.
