I'm willing to bet tomorrow will be more on topic. Well, for now:

On Tue, Jun 26, 2001 at 01:40:09AM +0000, Ken Seefried wrote:
> Kevin P. Neal writes:
> > 
> > Ha! You've never used Unix/390-or-whatever-they-call-it. The Unix-on-MVS
> > thing is the worst Unix on the market, hands down. Total crap. 
> 
> Well, duh. 
> 
> This is like saying the VAX sucks because POSIX on VMS is a turd.  Ever used 

I wasn't saying anything at all about the hardware. I also wasn't
referring to POSIX because WinNT shows that POSIX by itself is a joke.

> the Unix environment on CDC NOS/VE?  MVS/390 is really, really good at what 
> it is designed to do.  The fact that it doesn't run Unix well is, frankly, 
> not suprising. 

I wasn't saying anything whatsoever about the non-Unix parts of MVS. 
Personally, I think JCL is a bit of a pain in the neck. But that's OK
because JCL doesn't claim to be Unix. TSO, ISPF, SDSF, IPCS, etc etc
are all, well, different from Unix but don't claim to be Unix. Fine.

I just have a serious beef with the mainframe people at IBM who think
they have an idea of what Unix is but actually have very little clue.
As mainframe OS's go, MVS is, well, MVS. *shrug* Runs very well for lots
of sites. As Unix systems go the Unix-MVS thing just sucks rocks.

If IBM would just admit that UNIX/390 (whatever) sucks then I wouldn't
be so irked. What did IBM do? Send mainframe people to trade shows where
they would thump standards documents with their fists and just about
scream at people insisting that "THIS IS UNIX!". Uh, this is weak. 

Weird. They implemented tons and tons of Unix APIs but refuse to port
enough industry-standard user tools to make the thing usable. That's
really the heart of the thing that kills me. Like, I can't tell you
offhand if UNIX/390 ships with wc or nl or a host of others. It
ships with an NFS server and client but doesn't have showmount
available anywhere. It ships (or has shipped) with sendmail but no
built configuration files and no m4. The list goes on.
 
> BTW...Linux/390 is pretty kewl, but it runs on bare metal or VM, not MVS. 

Well, yeah, Linux/390 is an OS. This Unix-MVS thing is a subsystem of
MVS along with a number of other added programs. Totally different
ball game. I want to see NetBSD/390. Heh. The new machines are the
z/Architecture. Would that be NetBSD/z? NetBSD/zArch? NetBSD/390_64?

Oh, to collapse two posts into one: yes, there was an AIX/370. It's
dead now. I don't know details.
-- 
Kevin P. Neal                                http://www.pobox.com/~kpn/

"Nonbelievers found it difficult to defend their position in \ 
    the presense of a working computer." -- a DEC Jensen paper