Re: TSS I/O, ancient OS history

According to Lawrence D'Oliveiro  <ldo@nz.invalid>:

On Thu, 27 Jun 2024 17:39:46 +0000, MitchAlsup1 wrote:
>

I did; TSS 360/67 CMU, and I did; both PL/C and PL/1.

>
Did you make much use of LOCATE-style I/O?

I also programmed on TSS and no. It had its own virtual access methods
with names like VISAM that were integrated with the pager.

I suppose if you were reading or writing a tape you might have used
QSAM with locate mode but I never did tape stuff.

On OS/360 people used locate mode all the time. If you declared your
PL/I variables with base pointers it was easy to use and it was faster
since it avoided buffer copies.

I think COBOL normally did locate mode I/O for sequential files unless
you used READ INTO or WRITE FROM verbs.

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