It has been ten years since Sanford Wallace first burst onto the Internet. Since then he has gone offline and back online again at least twice, and repeatedly changed the city in which he does business. He stays on the move, presumably to prevent attempts at reprisals against him. The reason is that his business efforts make people angry. Wallace calls himself the original 'spam king.' Others call him 'Spamford' and much worse.  read more »

Last month, we talked about many of the details concerning the internal structure of the TSO Broadcast Dataset, which used to be known exclusively as SYS1.BRODCAST.
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As Steve Wozniak has been to personal computers, so was Arthur Andrew Collins before him, to ham radio. Using crude materials largely created for other purposes (a cylindrical oatmeal box, a lump of coal, a glass rod from a towel rack, a coil from a Model T), he and his childhood friend
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Mark Zuckerberg"An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come." ~ Victor Hugo  read more »

TSO has been around, on OS/360 (circa late-1960s) and on later MVT and MVS systems, for many years. Being the "terminal access" mechanism for the Operating System, and being "User and Userid oriented", TSO (in MVS) has always had a messaging system, so that one user could send messages to another user.
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If you are a regular attendee at mainframe conferences, you will have met Bob Rogers, or you will soon do so. It's unavoidable! Either way, you will not forget the high energy, effervescent spirit and non-stop monologue that both entertains and instructs - if you can keep up!
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Everybody knows that it's often difficult to write an Assembler program of any complexity, and most of us know that it sometimes can be even harder to debug it. The same holds true if you're programming in other languages. Writing error-free code takes a lot of effort, and usually, you don't want to make that same effort twice.
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In 1564, the year Galileo Galilei was born, Michelangelo and John Calvin both died. The Renaissance was well underway by then, and the royal courts of Europe and the Catholic church were becoming accustomed to bestowing favors upon individuals in return for deeds or cash. The Middle Ages had been marked by pestilence and famine.
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Like most IT pros, in my career I have owned an ever-evolving library of technical books, a total surely numbering well into the hundreds by now. The selection of books I keep at hand is in constant flux as IT platforms and technologies are supplanted by newer (and hopefully better) options, or as my interests and job duties change.  read more »

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