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From: sbanner1@uvicctr.UUCP (S. John Banner)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.arch
Subject: Re: Was the 360 badly-designed?  (was Re: Compatibility with EBCDIC)
Message-ID: <316@uvicctr.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 26-Aug-87 13:32:17 EDT
Article-I.D.: uvicctr.316
Posted: Wed Aug 26 13:32:17 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 29-Aug-87 09:17:08 EDT
References: <855@tjalk.cs.vu.nl> <2683@hoptoad.uucp> <916@haddock.ISC.COM> <1580@sol.ARPA> <294@rruxa.UUCP>
Reply-To: sbanner1@uvicctr.UUCP (S. John Banner)
Organization: University of Victoria, Victoria B.C. Canada
Lines: 45
Xref: mnetor comp.lang.c:3960 comp.arch:1976

In article <294@rruxa.UUCP> gwl@rruxa.UUCP (George W. Leach) writes:
>In article <1580@sol.ARPA>, crowl@rochester.UUCP writes:
>
>> 
>> I am not necessarily stating that the 360 architecture was well-designed, but I
>> am saying the architecture has shown flexibility and adaptability for many
>                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>> years.  If you wish to say the 360 architecture is bad, you must show why its
>  ^^^^^
>> adaptability is illusory.  The 360 architecture has been implemented on
>> machines spanning roughly two orders of magnitude in performance.  It has gone
>> from physical memory to virtual memory.  It supported a virtual machine long
>> before many other architectures did.  
>> 
>
>     I will not argue the architecture design issues.  The 360 was the
>top of the line when it was introduced.  I worked with one from 1980
>thru 1983 and from a software development environment point of view 
>(VM/CMS) it was terrible.  UNIX is such a far superior programming 
>environment to CMS that there is NO ARGUMENT here.
>

    I hate to get into this argument, but I just couldn't hold back
here.  You say "NO ARGUMENT", however I know of one person who I work
with (he is not on the net, he does ALL his work on CMS, and VS1), who
I am sure would disagree.  I know he has tried UNIX, and on several
ocasions he has asked me why I like it (UNIX is my prefered enviornment,
but I quite like VM/CMS as well).  Just as a side note, he has also told
me that he prefers 327x full-screen programming to windows on his Amiga
at home, and does most of his programming in /370 assembler, and REXX
(the system interpreter for those unfamiliar with VM/CMS).
   I do hope I havn't stepped on any toes here, because I don't really
want to see this topic go on for annother month or two.  It has been
an interesting and to some extent informative discussion, however, I
think it is beginning to degenerate (as do all of these discussions
eventually).

        Thanks for listening (assuming of course you did),

                      S. John Banner

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