Charles wrote:

>Saying MVS makes you look old-fashioned, even though MVS still exists 

>(I guess?) as a component of z/OS. Saying z/OS is limiting.

 

? Limiting how? If you mean "z/OS and predecessors", that's always worked
for me. Yes, MVS is a component of z/OS, as is USS. (Hey, let's debate "USS"
again-no, wait, let's not.)

 

>Ditto for the hardware. It is a little wordy to say "I have been writing 

>assembler for the S/360, S370, S/390 and z."

 

Same approach: "IBM Z and predecessors".

 

Skip Robinson wrote:

>Having wrestled with this issue for decades, I've come to adopt Mainframe
>as a generic term that most people recognize. (Ignoring the technowienies
>that debate the term endlessly.) No one argues with the term or even
>questions it. It covers hardware and software. You can use other terms if
>you need to get more specific.

 

That assumes z/OS is the only mainframe OS, which it certainly isn't. An
imprecision that leads to confusion-only z/OS folks think it's appropriate,
nobody else does. Plus I keep finding folks who think a CDC system or even
an IBM i is a "mainframe". Nope, I strongly believe in using the correct
term, "IBM Z", for the hardware; "z/OS" (or "z/VM", "z/VSE", "z/TPF", "Linux
for IBM Z") for the OS in question (plus maybe whatever's left of MUMPS
these days, if anything, and a few others, but they're pretty well all dead,
other than the Fujitsu mutant z/OS thing).

 

And of course most people don't come close to getting this right: how often
do you still hear "AS/400", a platform that's been dead for over two decades
AND whose descendants have been renamed repeatedly to boot (iSeries, System
i, now IBM i). Or "PowerPC" for Power. I keep explaining to people that
that's like calling your Core i9 laptop a "386": sorta kinda vaguely
reminiscent of being, but mostly just wrong.


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