On Wed, 13 Mar 2013 09:47:06 -0400, Gabe Goldberg wrote: >I'm writing about "Back to the Future" for mainframers -- historic (but >sometimes forgotten) mainframe lessons needed by and best-to-be learned >by new mainframers (but everyone, really). > Don't underestimate the future.
The Y2K "crisis" might have been mitigated if more designers had said, "Hey, pretty soon we're going to need 4-digit years. Let's provide them now." I made such a suggestion for a product we were working on in 1987. It was brushed off as premature. And much of the anguish of 24-bit to 31-bit address conversion might have been avoided if designers had thought to reserve the top 8 bits of addresses instead of using them for flags. Instead, many OS interfaces remain 24-bit constrained. How many programmers are still using 31-bit branch instructions rather than 64 because z/OS doesn't support execution above the bar? This year. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
