20 Oct
2011
20 Oct
'11
4:45 p.m.
> Have a ball, you're in my killfile now, but
don't let that stop you
> since I know you like hearing yourself talk.
This was not referring to you, Rich.
> If somebody was actually a sysprog *at the time in
an IBM shop* and
> can tell what was released and when they started copyrighting things,
> then great.
I'm familiar with the meaning of "the IBM OS
family of operating systems"
having worked with System/360s running OS/360 MFT in 1969, and onwards.
If so, your previous statement calling something that you thought runs on
Power (z/OS, which doesn't) the "IBM OS family" doesn't make any sense.
You
should have known that none of the MVS family ever ran on POWER. The tight
coupling of the OS and code to the hardware makes porting it impossible.
That's how this discussion got started.
I made a living on IBM System/370 systems from the
early 1970s until
1984, at which time I moved permanently
Ok. I started in the late 1970s on MFT writing systems software and
continued doing that until last year. Almost all of my experience has been
with tightly restricted code and doc and I don't remember much from the
days when IBM didn't have a stranglehold on their stuff.
I *know* what I'm talking about, with regard to
access to IBM sources. I
was at SHARE in San Francisco when the great OCO debate heated up again,
and still have my button reading "When source is outlawed, only outlaws
will have source" in my collection. I remember the discussions of the
changes in US copyright law, including court cases, which allowed program
sources to be copyrighted and have the copyrights stand up, in
_ComputerWorld_ and _Datamation_ and other trade rags.
I would have liked to hear all that info presented in a way that didn't
resemble a bar fight or ape-man chest pounding contest- I'm not speaking
about you necessarily but about this whole discussion. If you have some
extra time to kill, I would personally enjoy hearing about that period from
someone who was there, because I wasn't as I said earlier.