Anne & Lynn Wheeler wrote: <snip>
However, MVS system tended to require 10-30 people for care&feeding ... which scaled poorly to hundreds of distributed departmental computers (IPL and run with little or no human intervention).
It's certainly true that running the first large MVS system required a significant number of people (operators, production control, system programmers, etc.). However, the second through *n*th had far lesser incremental cost. I was a sysprog during this period and we supported 30-34 MVS systems (depending on the year) plus several VM systems with perhaps 3 people per MVS system overall.
I know of at least one customer who ran a one-person system programming shop at the time, too.
Also, because a substantial fraction of system programmer time was devoted to debugging at the time, I rather suspect the average ratio (whatever that might be) has improved markedly.
-- John Eells z/OS Technical Marketing IBM Poughkeepsie ee...@us.ibm.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
