Well, I've never done any sort development and at the risk of creating yet another nostalgia thread, I can tell you that I have seen a lot of tape sorts run and they were a thing of beauty. At any one point in time the sort program was reading half of the tape workfiles backwards. I guess that saved rewind time (?).
I used to buy third shift time at a service bureau that had two machines (a 360/40 and a 360/50, perhaps). They had five banks of eight 2401's each: two banks on each machine and one switchable. The operators would switch the switchable bank to one machine and run these HUGE multi-hour tape sorts on that machine. Absolutely a thing of beauty, a veritable ballet of spinning tape reels, dancing vacuum columns, and flashing lights. In fact, the third shift operators would turn off the datacenter lights, go out on the fire escape and smoke a little something, and then come back and sit for hours watching those flashing lights ... Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Blaicher, Christopher Y. Sent: Monday, February 06, 2017 12:13 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: BSAM vs QSAM (and SORT). If you consider me one of the SORT experts, I have been involved with sort development since the early 80's, and never once ran a tape sort. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
