This is still true to this day. I have spent some time playing around with MVS (precursor to z/OS, IBM's mainframe operating system) on an emulator, and it's been a very educational experience.
The first thing you notice is how everything is different. While the rest of the world was standardising on what a "file" was (a sequence of (not necessarily 8-bit) bytes) as early as the 60's, the IBM world has "datasets" which are rigidly formatted sequences of records.
The differences doesn't end there, and extends as far as terminology, referring to booting as IPL and disk drives as DASD.
When reading documents abd tutorials written by people who seemingly has worked with IBM systems for a long time, it also seems that while they know everything about how to operate z/OS, they are very ignorant of even basic features of "traditional" operating systems (which these days means Unix and Windows).
I was reading a discussion about Revedit, which is an editor that is popular on MVS, and it was praised for being incredibly advanced. I've used it, and compared to the other one I have access to (whose name escapes me) it sure is better.
But, the editor lacks a lot of functionality even the simplest of editors on Unix had (regexp, for example) and the fact that no one in the mainframe world seems to miss it suggests to me that people who work in the mainframe world simply don't think about computing in the same way as people who were raised on Unix.
I'm not suggesting that one approach is better than the other. I think there are things that each side could learn from the other. But right now I only see the mainframe side learning from Unix, and very little going the other way. I probably will never work with mainframes for real, but learning how they work had been very helpful. It would probably help the industry if more people tried that.
The first thing you notice is how everything is different. While the rest of the world was standardising on what a "file" was (a sequence of (not necessarily 8-bit) bytes) as early as the 60's, the IBM world has "datasets" which are rigidly formatted sequences of records.
The differences doesn't end there, and extends as far as terminology, referring to booting as IPL and disk drives as DASD.
When reading documents abd tutorials written by people who seemingly has worked with IBM systems for a long time, it also seems that while they know everything about how to operate z/OS, they are very ignorant of even basic features of "traditional" operating systems (which these days means Unix and Windows).
I was reading a discussion about Revedit, which is an editor that is popular on MVS, and it was praised for being incredibly advanced. I've used it, and compared to the other one I have access to (whose name escapes me) it sure is better.
But, the editor lacks a lot of functionality even the simplest of editors on Unix had (regexp, for example) and the fact that no one in the mainframe world seems to miss it suggests to me that people who work in the mainframe world simply don't think about computing in the same way as people who were raised on Unix.
I'm not suggesting that one approach is better than the other. I think there are things that each side could learn from the other. But right now I only see the mainframe side learning from Unix, and very little going the other way. I probably will never work with mainframes for real, but learning how they work had been very helpful. It would probably help the industry if more people tried that.