On 10/10/2016 04:17 PM, Mark Post wrote:
>>>> On 10/7/2016 at 08:09 AM, Tom Marchant
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> To paraphrase the article,
>> "Mainframe people are stupid and too snobbish to learn from us enlightened
>> PC weenies."
> I took it more like "Mainframe people don't know as much as they think they
> do and are too arrogant to ask for help." :)
>
>
> Mark Post
>
>
Did no one else notice the original article described the one who
trashed his PC as a "mainframe programmer", not a Mainframe Systems
Programmer or Mainframe Technical Support? By the time PCs came
around, a mere Mainframe Programmer should not have had the access to
trash things on the mainframe that would break the Operating System or
prevent an IPL, or even decide if an IPL was appropriate. Might it not
be natural for such a person to assume, until finding out otherwise,
that surely this new PC would be a step forward, not a step backward,
and have similar protective safeguards built in? The terse nature of
much early PC documentation didn't help a new user from the mainframe
world grok the fragile nature of the beast.
My take is that the article was probably written by someone unfamiliar
with the mainframe philosophy of restricting access to critical system
files to those actually responsible for their maintenance -- to those
who have been trained to understand the risks and how to minimize them.
Those without the knowledge were not allowed to play with dangerous
things in the mainframe world.
Joel C. Ewing
--
Joel C. Ewing, Bentonville, AR [email protected]
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