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Comment by slavapestov | Hacker News Reader

By "mainframe environment" the author of the article is presumably referring to IBM's zOS. Unlike minicomputers, DOS, etc, it's been continuously developed and improved over time. Other than using weird terminology for everything that comes from not being Unix-derived, nowadays it's a modern server OS.

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It's fun when the terminology indicates some things used to be accomplished by reading decks of cards.

The 'cards' statement is SAS remains one of my favorite ways to bring data into a program for exactly that reason.

This isn't solely a mainframe thing. The pty/tty designation for terminals on Linux is a reference to when the computer had no display, but output to a typewriter (to give one such example).

Also, tar is short for "tape archive".

Tape archives were actually cost-effective right up until a few years ago.

used to be being the relevant metric.

Linux and UNIX used to be installed using stacks of diskettes and piles of patience.

I once booted from a DAT tape.

Open a terminal session on pretty much any platform. If it defaults to being 80 columns wide, guess where that width comes from.

Where can I find a nice article about the design and the terminology?

Probably a proprietary, expensive training course.

Pretty much all of the related documentation is publicly available, AFAIK, and freely accessible on the internet from what I can tell. This availabilty is actually a legal requirement from times past, IIRC.

I like this:

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg246366.html?Open

My cousin recently went to a weeks-long class and got zOS certified. He's been a sysadmin at a university for years, and they don't use zOS there at all. But I think he did it just to learn the system and have some career insurance. I was fascinated that people are doing this.

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