16 Mar
1998
16 Mar
'98
3:13 a.m.
At 11:38 PM 3/15/98 +0000, you wrote:
The IBM midrange and mainframe stuff I've worked on (S/36, AS/400, MVS,
etc.) has always been _very_ proprietary. It's taken me three years just to
learn the name of the IBM manual that describes the inwards of the file
system on the System/36.
Is it this dearth of technical information that accounts for the lack of
interest in collecting old IBM?
--
David Wollmann |
dwollmann(a)ibmhelp.com | Support for legacy IBM products.
DST ibmhelp.com Technical Support | Data, document and file conversion for
IBM http://www.ibmhelp.com/ | legacy file and media formats.
IMHO. But to
go even further back, was there any IBM-bashing before
the 80's?
Well, according to the Jargon File (aka The Hacker's Dictionary), IBM
minis and mainframes were not liked by hackers (who prefered DEC, etc),
not only because they were generally programmed in things like Cobol, but
also because technical info was next-to-impossible to obtain. It was
difficult to do neat things with them.
I don't know if that counts as IBM bashing or not.
-tony