RE: At the risk of sounding like an AS/400 rah-rah...

["Joe Pluta" <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: bdietz@3x.com
>
> Actually winders NT and up (200 and XP) have a scheduler built in.

Cool!  I'm having a little trouble finding the options that allow you to
hold, release, modify or immediately execute the batch jobs, though.  Same
with the Unix stuff.  Probably because they don't exist.

Most of the schedulers for the PC-based OS's are pretty limited in their
capabilities, but that's simply a reflection of the evolution of the OS.
While OS/400 has been from its very inception all about handling business
applications, the PC OS's are primarily single user systems or multi-user
text processors.

Unix is closer to being able to handle business applications than Windows
because at least Unix was built for multi-user processing.  Windows was a
single-user multi-tasker, which "evolved" into a multi-user OS.

In both cases, though, scheduling is seen as more of a "system
administration" function than an operations function.  In fact, the concept
of a system operator is sort of foreign to most Unix/NT shops.  Rather than
having a subset of daily business operations that can be easily run by an
operator with minimal training, you instead have a bunch of technical
commands (cron, at, ...) that require somebody with some relatively in-depth
knowledge to use.

It's this philosophical divergence that really differentiates the IBM
midrange from the more technical OS's.  And if don't agree with that most
simple of comments, please send your responses to /dev/nul.

>smile<

Joe