You're really creating a member of a data set. What you get is far more flexible than a file but equally more complicated. The options come in handy when you're sequencing job steps together, as they let you specify sharing, cataloging, and automatic deletion under one or more specific types of job results.
> whereas IBM seems to be making no effort to bring z/OS to the public, so why bother chasing it?
It's a valuable and interesting part of computing history and understanding it's workflows gives good insight as to why many organizations continue to use them. They fill a very unique use case and exploring that is very interesting and enlightening.
The core concepts haven't changed in 70 years. You can even play with them today since a previous OS, MVS, was released publicly, and has been maintained as an open source project in recent years. If you get the Hercules emulator you can run a fully legal mainframe OS distribution right out of the box.
You're really creating a member of a data set. What you get is far more flexible than a file but equally more complicated. The options come in handy when you're sequencing job steps together, as they let you specify sharing, cataloging, and automatic deletion under one or more specific types of job results.
> whereas IBM seems to be making no effort to bring z/OS to the public, so why bother chasing it?
It's a valuable and interesting part of computing history and understanding it's workflows gives good insight as to why many organizations continue to use them. They fill a very unique use case and exploring that is very interesting and enlightening.
The core concepts haven't changed in 70 years. You can even play with them today since a previous OS, MVS, was released publicly, and has been maintained as an open source project in recent years. If you get the Hercules emulator you can run a fully legal mainframe OS distribution right out of the box.
It's a great gas. Highly recommend.