Glenn Cole wrote:

> A "process analyst" was just hired at a client site.  Her background
> appears primarily to be that of IBM mainframes.
>
> She made a claim about HP 3000 users being happy because they
> "own the whole machine," as opposed to IBM time-sharing users.
>
> Can someone please summarize for me -- or just point me to a site
> which explains -- what the deal is with IBM timesharing?

I loved Jeff Kell's answer (couched in Atmarian terms).

Not to answer the question, but...

When I worked at ROLM in Santa Clara, Ca, we had multitudes of HP3000s
and a large IBM 3090 (among others). When IBM bought the company, they
announced that the HP3000's would be replaced by IBM machines within 2
years. Therefore, they trained the HP3000 System Managers in the ways of
VM, MVS, TSO etc. While I never proceeded too far along that path as no
HP3000s were replaced even after 2 years of IBM ownership, it was
noticeable that the MVS/TSO/CICS system required several people to
handle all the tasks, each one jealously guarding their own territory
and knowledge. There were separate people for System Admin, DBA,
Networking/Datacommunications, CICS, TSO and other functions I don't
recall. These people were staggered that one person could do all these
equivalent tasks on the HP3000! In this context, one system manager
"owned" the whole machine.

Just my $.02.

Cheers,

John Dunlop

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