Talk:OS/360

A disaster?
I don't think it's wholly unreasonable to tag this with Category:Software engineering disasters - although now that I look at the contents of that category, I'm reconsidering! It was extremely late, extremely over-budget, extremely over-sized - you name it, along almost every axis it was a nightmare. A smaller company might have been sunk by such a problem - and many were, by smaller ones! Brooks himself had to step down from running the entire System/360 project to overseeing OS/360 to try and pull their irons out of the fire. Yes, it eventually got going, and was not too bad - but as Milo Medin's saying goes, "with enough thrust, anything will fly". Noel (talk) 03:49, 17 August 2005 (UTC)

Restructure of articles about IBM mainframe operating systems
After a big edit of MVS I concluded that the whole set of articles about IBM mainframe operating systems from System/360 onwards needed to be re-structured to minimise overlap and to make clearer the evolutionary relationships between these operating systems (notably in memory management, which is historically a major distinguishing feature). There is already some support for this proposal. Please add comments at Talk: MVS. Philcha 23:56, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

Rewrite of Job Control Language in progress
As part of the proposed restructure of articles on IBM mainframe operating systems (above), I've rewritten Job Control Language to: cover IBM's DOS/360 and its descendants as well as OS/360 and its descendants; focus more on the facilities and flavour of the 2 JCLs rather than on details of some statement types and some of their options. Please comment in Talk: Job Control Language. I'd be particulary grateful for more info on DOS/360 and its descendants, especially after 1980 - I only used DOS JCL a handful of times, and only in the late 1970s.

The rewrite does not currently take account of Truthanado's point in Talk: Job Control Language about use of "JCL" by computer suppliers other than IBM, which may entail further restructuring of articles about JCLs.Philcha 00:00, 21 October 2007 (UTC)