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Showing posts from December, 2021

MVS Version Names - Make sense of the versioning confusion

MVS Version Names MVS 3.8 from the TK4 distribution is what we know best. But often there is a misguided understanding that later versions are improvements and therefore better versions of MVS. That is not always true, and often not how IBM released software. In the beginning After the OS/360 (MFT and MVT) start, IBM released OS/VS2 rel 1, as the next version. That name, OS/VS2 stuck to this very day. Every subsequent release was an OS/VS2 operating system. OS/VS r1 was also called SVM, for Single Virtual Memory. Quickly after IBM renamed that to SVS, Single Virtual Storage. Why the change from "memory" to "storage"? Because IBM had decided to switch with the last S/370 mainframes from core memory to solid state storage instead. SVS was mainly geared at solving real memory fragementation. MVS In the mid 1970s, (1973 to be exact) IBM annoucned MVS. This very important new operarting systems, now allowed each application to have its own full 16MB address sp