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dgadj38998

> ISPF is directly connected to the mainframe, and there’s no such thing as a local development environment here.

That's pretty crazy

Sounds like having the whole team SSH into one server and doing all the work through the terminal

I'm imagining editing my co-workers files and just removing a random semicolon to mess with them

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That was the 1960s-80s way of working with computers. Multiple terminals connected to a single timesharing mainframe (or mini, for that matter). You might have a network like DECNET, but mostly it would be hardwired terminals, or if you were less lucky, a dialup modem and an acoustic coupler at a blazing 300 bps. You were sharing one machine with potentially dozens of other developers.

Legacies of this abound in Linux (even the ability to SSH in is a descendant of this world). Commands like "who" are there to show who's logged in, and there's even an entire process accounting system that can be switched on to bill your users for CPU time.

Was there a way to message other people who are logged in? Like a slack equivalent?

On Unix, there was the "talk" command for split-screen chat, and also "write" to just send a message to someone else's terminal subject to permission with the "mesg" command. Not all systems had such provisions (or, in come cases, they had to be written by users).

talk, or later ntalk in Unix. Or wall to send to everyone. I used a system in the 80's (Pick DB) that had a send-message command. Also tandem which allowed you to take over someone's terminal like screen-sharing now. If you were the super-user you could do it without asking for permission, and start typing messages to the unlucky user..

Long before Slack, there was TSO SEND. :-)

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/explorer-for-zos/3.1.1?topic=mes...

We used `talk` all the time in our university Solaris labs when I was there from 2000-2005. Mostly insults, but it was fun.

That was it. You had to organise amongst yourselves who was editing which program, and there was no version code control other than anything you could come up with using manual copies. It was primitive.

I was using an Amiga at home and had been using Xenix and honest to god AT&T UNIX in my previous job so had some idea of what I was missing. I also used IBM S36s and weird Burroughs things so had a pretty wide education on different types of systems in a short time.

Things is source code management these days even in mainframe but many shops still have you log into the same "box" to do your development. It can get pretty fun when trying to coordinate testing and patches.

> Things is source code management these days even in mainframe

Source code management on mainframes has been around for decades now. Pansophic started selling Panvalet in 1970, and Broadcom still sells CA-Panvalet.

Closer to RCS than to Git in feature set.

> but many shops still have you log into the same "box" to do your development

It is very common to have separate LPARs for production, test and development, even if all three are running on the same physical hardware - the isolation is strong enough that it is rare for something running in one LPAR to cause a problem in another.

The largest shops will have physically separate mainframes for production and non-production.

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