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From: stuart@bms-at.UUCP (Stuart D. Gathman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.arch
Subject: Re: Was the 360 badly-designed?  (was Re: Compatibility with EBCDIC)
Message-ID: <474@bms-at.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 24-Aug-87 15:13:38 EDT
Article-I.D.: bms-at.474
Posted: Mon Aug 24 15:13:38 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 25-Aug-87 07:24:44 EDT
References: <855@tjalk.cs.vu.nl> <2683@hoptoad.uucp> <916@haddock.ISC.COM> <1580@sol.ARPA>
Organization: Business Management Systems, Inc., Fairfax, VA
Lines: 16
Summary: missed point
Xref: mnetor comp.lang.c:3884 comp.arch:1912


The original reference to 360 archecture referred to *software*, not hardware
since the use of EBCDIC is primarily a software (and firmware in the case
of printers and terminals) issue.  The 360 is obviously a very good hardware
design since so many people manage to do useful things with such
terrible software.

I think VM370 is elegant, but then IBM never did like it very much.  The
single user OS's that run on top of VM are, in general, still awful.

NOTE - no hard facts here (except for the first sentence).  Just opinions.
I don't have time at the moment for hard facts, but my opinions are based
on 9 years experience.
-- 
Stuart D. Gathman	<stuart@bms-at.uucp>
			<..!{vrdxhq|dgis}!bms-at!stuartis