Well, like a busted clock, Bill isn't wrong *every* time. The thinking is that since Kids Today expect GUIs, having one will make z/OS more attractive/usable for them. That's probably not wrong: y'all use ISPF, right? That's a GUI, such as they were circa 1980. Why do you use it? Because it's more productive: it makes stuff easier for you. Same argument will apply to that PFSK who takes over after you and I stroke out in front of our 3270 emulators.
I believe the questions are, as I implied in my earlier post: 1) Is z/OSMF usable as a GUI--that is, is it sufficiently functional to solve the problem? It *seems* like the answer may be "no". But I admit I have not touched it (I don’t need to--yet). 2) Is z/OS even GUI-able without major structural changes? DOS really wasn't. As we know, it went from "Here's a shell on top of DOS" to "Here's Windows, with a DOS "command prompt" emulator available". That's a fundamental difference. Does z/OS need that level of change? I suspect so, especially since so much is non-standard nowadays--there's no "All the parmlib stuff is always in SYS1.PARMLIB" the say "All .ini files are in C:\Windows". Heck, that's so ingrained that any of you who ever had a Windows machine with Windows on some drive other than C will recall various products that absolutely would not work...and that's *with* that standardization! I'd like z/OSMF to be The Answer. I'm just not convinced that the folks driving it understand the challenge or have the resources/vision to meet it. I hope I'm wrong. -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Tom Longfellow Sent: Friday, July 12, 2024 9:05 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: another z/OSMF rant. -- Catch-22 is killing me In what way does z/OSMF make zOS more viable? The new crowd of fresh young bucks will have to learn 'something' in order to work with zOS. Why does it have to be an 'abstraction' layer isolating them from the down and dirty details to get a working system. Right now, their "viability" tool has me dead in the water. Unable to do my JOB. Sooner or later someone will notice and it will be another nail in the casket of zOS and IBM. Oh sure, GUIs are cool looking and sexy. We are finishing up year 25+ of a 5 year plan to get off the mainframe. It was sold to the money men with a few prototype panels of how the GUI might work. The only techincal detail they were concerned with was "When can we have it". I contend that the total costs of the grand networks of interelated servers costs way more than the costs on our mainframe. But, sturdy work horse don't look the same as thoroughbreds. Pretty pictures win the day. I guess I am not buying into current thinking. like "If you CAN encrypt, you MUST encrypt" , "If it CAN look like Windows, it MUST look like Windows" ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
