kerravon wrote:Most of my time (decades) has been spent trying to understand the difference between MVS mainframes and PCs. I'm now happy with the status of my mainframe knowledge so I am venturing into PCs now.
This statement raises more questions than it answers, as (to the best of my knowledge) MVS as a stand-alone OS was phased out by IBM in the late 1970s. While it remained supported for decades later (running virtualized under VM/370 and its successors), I know of no installations which were using it as a non-virtualized OS even at the time the original PC was released (you have to remember, in those old mainframe shops, it was IBM who usually had the last say on such things, not the customer, who often had no idea what the IBM-trained system admins were up to - if Big Blue said to go with a hypervisor, they did). I can only assume I am mistaken about that, but... seriously?
What is more, the wording implies that you were
studying MVS systems, and doing so recently at that, rather than using them professionally, which is the only reason I can imagine anyone would
want to learn about them. Have I misread this, and if not, what could possibly compel you to do something so daft?
MVS is a now fifty year old system which was notorious for its terrible engineering even in its day (like Windows XP, it was eventually patched into a semblance of stability which made it successors look worse to people who never saw how bad it was originally; though it was a lot longer process than it was for XP, which resulted in a system that was not so much a fixed version of MVS as it was a completely new OS built from patches, which emulated the original OS 's behavior and API). I can't imagine anyone seeing it - or indeed any of the OSes from that era (I'm looking at you, Mr Torvalds) - as a meaningful guide to how an OS should be designed.
Curiosity is something I can respect, but this seems about as useful
vis a vis the general world of programming as learning how to write LGP-30 machine code because you liked the
Story of Mel. (actually, the last example at least sounds interesting as a bit of odd, pointless,
ars gratia artis retrocomputing, which neither MVS nor MS-DOS are to me). What am I missing here?
Also, I need to mention that even the 'huge' PC library was small compared to what came out of Windows,
especially in terms of games. This is something Tilde keeps missing - that their nostalgia was clouding their recollection of just how small the library actually was, and how bad almost all the programs really were.
But it sounds as if you were there, too, unlike Tilde (who I am pretty sure is a bit too young to have actually used DOS in its heyday). This lack of historical perspective from someone who lived through that period is puzzling to me.
As someone who worked tech in those days, I can also tell you that most people never really used DOS itself if they could avoid it - most people got someone to put an autoexec.bat file on their floppies to start running Lotus 1-2-3 or WordPerfect or some such right away, because MS-DOS was an alien landscape to them. Startup menu programs (which were generally just the same sort of batch file) were almost universal for those who had hard drives. Even when MS-DOS was the dominant OS, most people who had PC didn't use it directly if they could help it.
Given this, using DOSBox or the equivalent is likely to be more productive
and more authentic, even if you hate Windows and Linux (at least with Linux, you could run it from a shell-only system).
