Talk:Mainframe sort merge

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OK, I took out the word simple from "... and produce simple reports." Also added a link to the Wiki article on sort algorithms, and mention of the copy function in modern sorts. I also deleted a bunch of sales pitch jargon added by some idiot, apparently pushing the SyncSort product. T-bonham (talk) 06:56, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

"... and produce simple reports." doesn't really do the capabilities of any of the products justice. I think we should say something like "... and produce both quick-and-dirty and complex-and-sophisticated reports". I'm thinking here of ICETOOL and SYNCTOOL for the QnD and eg OUTFIL and IFTHEN for CnS reports. Opinions?

Note: While a friend of the DFSORT Development team I'm trying to keep this neutral. This is NOT the place to be doing COMPETITIVE marketing, of course. Martin Packer 19:41, 15 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Title

Although this article is titled "Mainframe sort merge" it is specifically about IBM. It also says "Prior to the System/370, all IBM mainframe operating systems included sort/merge utilities." I suspect, but can't verify that this would be "all mainframe operating systems," period.The article should either be expanded to include non-IBM systems, or it should be renamed "IBM Mainframe sort merge." This would not even be correct, since DOS and VM/CMS had a different sort program from OS/360. Peter Flass (talk) 20:20, 21 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I wouldn't be surprised if all vendors had S/M utilities bundled with their operating systems, but there were quite a few competitive systems and the claim would be difficult to verify. It might be better to extend the claim only to those vendors for which you have an RS.

Renaming the article would be correct, but the article would still be very incomplete. I'd rather keep the name and try to find information about other vendors.

I don't recall what S/M CP-67 and VM/370 had. --Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 22:38, 21 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It looks like z/VM has a SORT command, I assume CMS had similar. "The sorting operation takes place with two passes of the input file. The first pass creates an ordered pointer table in virtual storage. The second pass uses the pointer table to read the input file in a random manner and write the output file." As you would expect it's pretty simplistic compared to the OS/360 sort. Multics has a sort_seg command. I don't think anything compared to OS/360, which, besides the 1403, is possibly one reason for IBM's dominance in commercial computing. Peter Flass (talk) 03:31, 22 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]