With a heartfelt nostra culpa, IBM this week acknowledged that it had closed its ears to the earnest entreaties of users when it stubbornly tried to kill off DOS/VSE – and that it had failed in the attempt, simply leaving a lot of very unhappy users who were certain they didn’t want to take on the complexities of MVS and Enterprise Systems Architecture, and didn’t know where to turn as they ran out of steam with DOS/VSE. With top brass over from Boblingen, West Germany, now entrusted with DOS/VSE development, the company invited a crowd of journalists up to White Plains, New York to set the record straight. The next release of VSE, which is due to ship at the end of the year, adds some of the basic functionality of MVS so that DOS/VSE can more easily be run at remote sites talking to a central MVS host. As a comparatively simple operating system, DOS/VSE enables users to process high volumes of routine work and unlike MVS doesn’t require them to give back such a large part of their machine to IBM in operating system overhead. But many users are hitting the ceiling, particularly with regard to the 16Mb address limit – but IBM promised that an Extended Architecture release with 31-bit addressing was on the way. The timescale hinted at was 18 months. Also to be added are some of the security functions of MVS that are currently missing. But IBM is still worried at the idea that users might eschew MVS altogether and simply take DOS/VSE up to its very biggest machines, so there will continue to be some limitations – it is unlikely to support the newest disk drives, for example. Why didn’t IBM origi nally include the operating system among the Systems Application Ar chitecture pantheon? It came out with one of the lamest IBM answers ever: we forgot, it suggested.
