ranking on IBM (was Re: AT&T Joining OSF)

[Scott Schwartz]

In article <276 at quintus.UUCP> ok at quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
>In article <19709 at tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> mudd-j at pike.cis.ohio-state.edu (John R. Mudd) writes:
>>In article <269 at quintus.UUCP> ok at quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
>>>In article <670025 at hpclscu.HP.COM> shankar at hpclscu.HP.COM (Shankar Unni) writes:
>>>:Product quality is usually priority number 1
>>>Have you ever used VM/CMS?
>>but I *liked* VM/CMS from a user point-of-view.
>
>I can see your point of view, I mean, 80-column records and tape drives
>I'm talking about ordinary user-level programs written in PL/I being able
>to crash a user's virtual machine and trash a virtual disk on the way.

Not just ordinary programs do this, either.  Happens all the time with
ISPF or SQL; applications that you know IBM cares a lot about and
expects a whole range of users to mess with. (At least the crashing
part.  I haven't lost a mini disk yet.)

> ...
In recent releases of vm/cms there were only a limited number of files
that could be spooled at a time, something like 10K.  I've heard of
instances where a 3090 with a bitnet connection to a unix site crashed
and could not be rebooted because there were too many files (usenet
articles, probably :-) waiting to be shipped over.  I'm told that this
has been fixed. 

One claim that IBM loving friends of mine have made is that on site
service is very good.  If true, this could be a good selling
point.  Big sites worry a lot about maintainance.

>And so on.  IBM have many strengths, and VM/CMS software
>is no more flaky than a lot of other stuff, but it is nothing special
>either.

Very likely true.


-- 
Scott Schwartz  <schwartz at swarthmore.edu>  <psuvax1!vu-vlsi!swatsun!schwartz>