On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 10:25 AM, Paul Gilmartin <[email protected]>wrote:
> 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. Indeed -- look at CCWs: if they'd put the flags in the reserved byte instead, we'd only have needed one format! (Well, until there's 64-bit I/O, anyway). -- zMan -- "I've got a mainframe and I'm not afraid to use it" ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
