Charles Mills wrote:
FTP was written by a group of people who were (IMO) people that never saw
a MF computer and had no concept of how it worked
... and who represented a flood of programming creativity in the small that
surrounded and bound the mainframe
world to their will just as the Lilliputians surrounded and bound Gulliver!
Seriously though, the ability to extend FTP via site commands rendered it easy
for IBM architects to add the
necessary functionality for FTP <> record-based systems. FTP is probably the
most mainframe-like program
in the Unix world.
Twenty-two years ago I was making suggestion after suggestion how to liberate
mainframing from its self-architected
prison of inaccessability to creative youth, an inaccessiblity which I felt
threatened the future of mainframes.
Now I'm 64 and working on decommissions. Ah well, here come the quantum
computers. IBM shall rise again!
--
Jack J. Woehr # Science is more than a body of knowledge. It's a way of
www.well.com/~jax # thinking, a way of skeptically interrogating the universe
www.softwoehr.com # with a fine understanding of human fallibility. - Carl Sagan
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