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From: drw@cullvax.UUCP (Dale Worley)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.arch
Subject: Was the 360 badly-designed?  (was Re: Compatibility with EBCDIC)
Message-ID: <1486@cullvax.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 24-Aug-87 16:02:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: cullvax.1486
Posted: Mon Aug 24 16:02:51 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 25-Aug-87 04:39:05 EDT
Organization: Cullinet Software, Westwood, MA, USA
Lines: 21
Xref: mnetor comp.lang.c:3878 comp.arch:1901

The 360 *architecture* is really clean and elegant (although some of
the 370 and later extensions aren't as nice).  It was the first
machine language I learned.  When I later learned pdp-11 machine
language, I realized that the two shared a certain elegance...  mostly
revolving around general registers and symmetry of instruction
structure.  (Though the 11, using the concept of 'addressing modes'
was much better in that regard.)  Compare this with, say, the 8086,
which has about 15 flavors of 'move' instruction.

Now, the *software* that IBM put on the 360, on the other hand, takes
absolutely *no* awards for design.  The best proof of this is the
success of VM/370, which (in its original incarnation) essentially
places a raw 370 in the hands of the user.  VM/370 is a better program
development environment than MVS (nee OS/360), showing that a raw 370
is a better development environment than a 370 with MVS running on it.

Dale
-- 
Dale Worley	Cullinet Software		ARPA: cullvax!drw@eddie.mit.edu
UUCP: ...!seismo!harvard!mit-eddie!cullvax!drw
OS/2: Yesterday's software tomorrow	    Nuclear war?  There goes my career!