[Gllug] Hello all

[Ian Northeast]

Rich Walker wrote:
> salsaman <salsaman at xs4all.nl> writes:
> 
> 
>>James Roberts wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Originally trained as IBM 360 asssembly programmer/analyst at Control Data Corporation rather a
>>>long time ago.
>>
>>You haXXored mainframes...in assembly ?! That's pretty 1337...;-)

Nothing unusual about using assembler on mainframes. It's not as bad as 
it sounds, when you have hardware with instructions like "sort" (RISC it 
is not:) and a large collection of macros for common tasks like I/O it 
really isn't hard at all. I was doing this until about 1990.

Most of MVS's (or zOS's as it is now called) system software is written 
in assembler. MVS itself is, as is JES and, IIRC, CICS. The only major 
component which isn't is TSO, written in PL/S. They used to supply the 
source for quite a bit of it too (in some cases on microfiche so it was 
only of any practical use for reference).

> I have a recollection that the main system tool on IBM mainframes used
> to be called HACK: patches of the system binaries were circulated and
> this tool used to apply them...

Zap, superseded by SuperZap. And yes, patches to binaries were 
distributed applied with this tool. They still are.

> (but I'm willing to be completely wrong about that)

How about partly wrong?

Regards, Ian




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