Master the Mainframe course…thoughts

I thought this was a good intro into z/OS. I had been playing with MVS on Hercules, and I wanted to have some idea on how MVS and z/OS differed. Is MVS so old that I’m wasting my time learning it? Other than obvious improvements over the years, I found the biggest differentiator is the addition and integration of Unix into z/OS.

I was pleasantly surprised on how similar the almost 40yo MVS 3.8j, that runs on Hercules, is to z/OS. According to Wikipedia, MVS 3.8j was released in 1981! It also shows what a great job the builders of MVS on Hercules did! In my case that would be the TK4- package. The ISPF like TSO program is remarkably similar to the one on modern z/OS. IMHO, you can truly gain valuable relevant mainframe skills using it.

Also as a further testament to IBM, I must say how similar programming (which includes JCL) is on MVS to the 50+ yo MVT system I was schooled in. I have most, if not all my school runbooks and it is very similar…pretty amazing! Many of the utilities are the same. According to Wikipedia TSO wasn’t even added to MVT until 1971. An as a student I didn’t have a terminal available and hence no TSO/ISPF…I used a card punch machine to enter programs and JCL.