From: Egan Orion 

Joe Barr wrote:
>
> Do you still have a S/360 Pops manual?  The section on instruction fetch
> is some of the most amazing, creative, and artfully crafted obfuscation
> I've ever seen.  Almost surreal.

Yeah, some sections of the Principles of Operation were amazingly dense. I
recall that the first half about System Initialization was incredibly
opaque, too. One had to absorb the actual code (on microfiche, then) to
actually understand it. Some people who did that built great utilities, and
made some real money. Remember QuickFetch, and early DASD managers?

I recall actually sending in one of those IBM comment forms, correcting
misstatement of BAL linkage conventions in the front of System Macros. I
don't know if IBM ever fixed that. It was possibly intentional anyway...

But no, I didn't save any old manuals. zSeries has become uninteresting.

Egan

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