On Fri, 31 Dec 2004 10:58:12 -0500, Shane O'Donnell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > REXX (IMO) was Perl before Perl. A powerful scripting language that had > some relatively deep hooks into the OS itself (especially OS/2), REXX had > the additional benefit of running on any platform in IBM's SAA, including > OS/2, AIX on RS/6000, OS/370, OS/400.
Actually REXX predated OS/2, and even the IBM PC. Its original incarnation was on CMS. CMS started out as the Cambridge Monitor System and came out of the IBM Cambridge Scientific Center in the late 1960s or early 1970s. It was a "single user" operating system which ran on top of CP-67 which ran on the IBM 360 Model 67, which IIRC was the first member of the 360 family to have virtual memory. CP-67 was a virtual machine operating system. Each user got his or her own virtual 360. You could run any of the other 360 OSes in any virtual machine. Most time sharing users ran CMS. It made a great development environment for OS/360 or DOS/360 programmers would do their editing on CMS and submit jobs to a virtual OS/360 or DOS/360 machine for compilation and testing. Later on when the 370 came out, CP-67/CMS became VM/370 with CP and CMS as components, CMS was redubbed the Conversational Monitor System. The "shell" language for CMS was called Exec. The original REXX was a substitute for Exec and stood for "Reformed Executor" Like REXX much of the early software which came from inside IBM for the PC had its origins in CMS. For most of us IBMers who were the "first day orderers" of the PC, CMS was our daily environment, and it made sense to port tools and toys from there. I doubt that many remember the XT-370. This was an IBM PC-XT which had hardware 370 emulation in the form of a Motorola 68000 core with custom microcode. I remember that when it came out along with the PC3270 Barrons had a cover story about how the Personal Computer wars were over because IBM had brought its mainframe architectures to the desktop. It quickly became apparent that these were "next-bench" products with no real appeal to the market place. That mainframe vs. PC tug of war was the main factor in shaping computing over the next 10-15 years. I was heavily involved with the internal IBM Microcomputer Hobbyists club up in Poughkeepsie before I moved down here, and during the time the IBM PC hit the market. We went from a bunch of S-100 hackers, then added Apple and TRS-80 users, and then lots of PC users. I'll never forget one of our newsletters which featured a cartoon of pc's stealing the "eggs" (in the form of winchester disk cartridges) from the dinosaur mainframes. OS/2 was the ultimate expresion of those tensions. I was at the meetings at the IBM Hursley labs when IBM and Microsoft were hammering out how the OS/2 Presentation Manager would be designed. The IBM guys were all coming from a world where interactive graphics meant CAD/CAM systems running on things like 3250 displays, while the Microsoft guys, and the more PC application oriented guys from IBM saw the requirements coming from powerful WYSIWYG word processing and page layout apps and the like. Thats why the OS/2 PM coordinate system had y increasing as you went up while the Windows coordinate system was the opposite so as to make the text and graphics coordinate systems more compatible. And of course today, the PC architecture has pretty much taken over from the mainframe. -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
