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From: Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: The Design of Design
Date: Wed, 1 May 2024 19:28:55 -0000 (UTC)
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Scott Lurndal <scott@slp53.sl.home> schrieb:

> The worst parts of JCL were "DD" cards, manual track allocation, and the lack
> of any form of real filesystem.   PDS do not count.

The lack of a hierarchical file system was due to the OS, not
really JCL itself.  But the difference is mostly academic to the
user, who has to deal with the idiosyncracies of the OS through JCL.

But PDS (which you needed to use, in reality) were also a trap if
you wrote to one member and read another one... or you locked it
with DISP=OLD and could not access it for reading.  Rather like
Microsoft Windows these days, by the way...

Personally, I found the limited number of extents for a file
(sorry, dataset) to be most bothersome.  If you exceeded this
(and space for new members of PDS was not reclaimed), you got an
ABEND E37 (or something similar).  Bah.

Although it wasn't all bad... as a student, I did a side job of
keeping track of file allocations etc on a mainframe for one of
the institutes, plus some scientific work, on an hourly basis.
This took quite some hours.  I also accidentally broke through
RACF once; that was fun.