I may be mistaken, but I get the impression you think you're disagreeing with Mr Pommier and maybe Mills. If that's what you meant to do, I don't think you've succeeded yet. They're saying that saving DASD space was often important; you're saying that some programmers at some companies were either wasteful of it, either carelessly or ignorantly. Judging from my own experience, I think both are true.
--- Bob Bridges, [email protected], cell 336 382-7313 /* I am pretty sure that, if you will be quite honest, you will admit that a good rousing sneeze, one that tears open your collar and throws your hair into your eyes, is really one of life's sensational pleasures. -Robert Benchley */ -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Gerhard adam Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2020 15:20 ... and so goes the mythology. The truth is that programmers routinely used lousy block sizes and wastes tremendous amounts of space. JCL sizes were rarely scrutinized nor was data set usage. It was entirely possible for test data to exist for weeks or months beyond its usefulness This isn’t to say that money was obviousness spent and even wasted, but few installations took managing their DASD seriously. They would worry about saving a byte by packing a date while wasting 100 tracks due to poor blocking. This is why nothing really happened until System Determined Blocksize, and the Storage Administrator tools became available. People certainly wrung their hands but rarely did anything about it --- On Wed, Apr 22, 2020 at 12:08 PM -0700, "Pommier, Rex" <[email protected]> wrote: Agreed. Another thing to remember was that we were dealing with disk volumes measured in kilobytes or megabytes instead of terabytes. In addition, the site I cut my teeth on had all removable disk packs that got rotated onto the drives for processing of each application. Every byte saved per record gave us the better chance of fitting the entire set of datasets on a single disk set so we could process it. -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List On Behalf Of Charles Mills Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2020 12:32 PM Faulty logic there. A byte here and byte there and pretty soon you have to buy ANOTHER unit of DASD. It costs the same empty or full, but if it gets nearly full you have to pay for another. -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Gerhard adam Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2020 10:06 AM The notion of “savings” was marketing nonsense. The DASD was paid for regardless of whether it held a production database or someone’s golf handicap. It cost the same whether it was empty or full. The notion of “saving” was nonsense and even under the best of circumstances could only be deferred expenses ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
