On 24 November 2013 14:07, John Gilmore <[email protected]> wrote: > Now 'antique' and 'antiquated' are closely related etymologically; but > 'antiquated' is pejorative. To antiquate is to make obsolete, and I > am not sure that z/OS is obsolete.
And one might reasonably also say that "antique", while not pejorative in the way that "antiquated" is, nonetheless is usually used in a positive sense as a mark of respect for age, marvel that it has lasted as long as it has, admiration for the fine workmanship of the day, and so on. It's certainly rare to hear antique as a positive description of a technically current device or system. Then there are the doubtless closely related "antiquity" and "an antiquity", neither of which is likely to be good thing when used in respect of a current operating system. On the matter of how old something must be to be an antique, I have a grandfather (formally "long case") clock made around 1800, and a receipt showing that it was bought in an antique shop by my great great uncle in the late 1890s. My mother said of this clock that it was an antique because it was 90 years old, and she understood that to be the British rule of the time. Perhaps it still holds, but in that case the TOD clock will have rolled over some time before even the ancestors of z/OS qualify. Quite coincidently, *I* will qualify within a couple of months of that rollover. Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
