Date:         Sun, 17 Oct 2010 08:24:34 -0700
Reply-To:     "Schwarz, Barry A" <barry.a.schwarz@BOEING.COM>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         "Schwarz, Barry A" <barry.a.schwarz@BOEING.COM>
Subject:      Re: SAS on mainframes
In-Reply-To:  <20101016182825.AE027270@resin17.mta.everyone.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

TSO is no more an operating system on IBM mainframes than the Bourne shell is an operating system on Unix.  And unless you are submitting jobs to be run in batch, it is completely unrelated to JCL.

-----Original Message-----
From: SAS(r) Discussion [mailto:SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Mary
Sent: Saturday, October 16, 2010 6:28 PM
To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: SAS on mainframes

Also you should find out specifically what is meant by "mainframes"; a lot of people have responded in terms of working on IBM mainframes, which are a much higher level of complexity than working on UNIX.  On IBM mainframes, there is an operating system called TSO which involves JCL and really is very difficult to learn- I worked on it for 7 years.   But sometimes people will call large UNIX systems mainframes as well, which I think is much easier to work with and use, particularly if you can work with an editor like Ultra Edit to edit your programs rather than the editors on Unix.

It is the operating systems that you would need to learn in order to work on these systems; the UNIX operating system is a lot like DOS (i.e. command level from Windows), whereas the TSO operating system is quite unlike anything else you may have encountered, but IBM mainframes can handle lots of users and run programs very quickly.

Thus you should think about learning two operating systems
a) Unix
b) TSO