REXX Lovers Unite! (was RE: OT! Re: [TriLUG] Defeated by a website..)

Rick DeNatale rick.denatale at gmail.com
Fri Dec 31 17:24:40 EST 2004


On Fri, 31 Dec 2004 10:58:12 -0500, Shane O'Donnell <shaneo at nc.rr.com> wrote:
> REXX (IMO) was Perl before Perl.  A powerful scripting language that had
> some relatively deep hooks into the OS itself (especially OS/2), REXX had
> the additional benefit of running on any platform in IBM's SAA, including
> OS/2, AIX on RS/6000, OS/370, OS/400.

Actually REXX predated OS/2, and even the IBM PC.  Its original
incarnation was on CMS.

CMS started out as the Cambridge Monitor System and came out of the
IBM Cambridge Scientific Center in the late 1960s or early 1970s. It
was a "single user" operating system which ran on top of CP-67 which
ran on the IBM 360 Model 67, which IIRC was the first member of the
360 family to have virtual memory. CP-67 was a virtual machine
operating system. Each user got his or her own virtual 360. You could
run any of the other 360 OSes in any virtual machine. Most time
sharing users ran CMS. It made a great development environment for
OS/360 or DOS/360 programmers would do their editing on CMS and submit
jobs to a virtual OS/360 or DOS/360 machine for compilation and
testing.  Later on when the 370 came out, CP-67/CMS became VM/370 with
CP and CMS as components, CMS was redubbed the Conversational Monitor
System.

The "shell" language for CMS was called Exec. The original REXX was a
substitute for Exec and stood for "Reformed Executor"

Like REXX much of the early software which came from inside IBM for
the PC had its origins in CMS. For most of us IBMers who were the
"first day orderers" of the PC, CMS was our daily environment, and it
made sense to port tools and toys from there.

I doubt that many remember the XT-370. This was an IBM PC-XT which had
hardware 370 emulation in the form of a Motorola 68000 core with
custom microcode.  I remember that when it came out along with the
PC3270 Barrons had a cover story about how the Personal Computer wars
were over because IBM had brought its mainframe architectures  to the
desktop. It quickly became apparent that these were "next-bench"
products with no real appeal to the market place.

That mainframe vs. PC tug of war was the main factor in shaping
computing over the next 10-15 years.  I was heavily involved with the
internal IBM Microcomputer Hobbyists club up in Poughkeepsie before I
moved down here, and during the time the IBM PC hit the market.  We
went from a bunch of S-100 hackers, then added Apple and TRS-80 users,
and then lots of PC users. I'll never forget one of our newsletters
which featured a cartoon of pc's stealing the "eggs" (in the form of
winchester disk cartridges) from the dinosaur mainframes.

OS/2 was the ultimate expresion of those tensions.  I was at the
meetings at the IBM Hursley labs when IBM and Microsoft were hammering
out how the OS/2 Presentation Manager would be designed. The IBM guys
were all coming from a world where interactive graphics meant CAD/CAM
systems running on things like 3250 displays, while the Microsoft
guys, and the more PC application oriented guys from IBM saw the
requirements coming from powerful WYSIWYG word processing and page
layout apps and the like.  Thats why the OS/2 PM coordinate system had
y increasing as you went up while the Windows coordinate system was
the opposite so as to make the text and graphics coordinate systems
more compatible.

And of course today, the PC architecture has pretty much taken over
from the mainframe.



More information about the TriLUG mailing list