EXEC I/O

Friday, July 04, 2008 - Posts

• TLA

  Today I feel like an abbreviated rant. About ambiguity for the sake of brevity.   What do SMS, SMP and TSO have in common? They're all ambiguous mainframe TLA's!   What's a TLA? Why a Three-Letter Acronym of course! That is, unless you wish to point out that it's not an acronym if it doesn't form a word, in which case it's a Three-Letter Abbreviation. In other words, even TLA itself has a somewhat ambiguous meaning.   Then there are ETLA's - Extended TLA's, or Four-Letter Acronyms/Abbreviations.   I blame JFK, LBJ and the lot of them for the initial steps down this path. But whether or not it's really their faults, the fact is that we've discovered a real affinity for these brief referents (heck, even my parents chose my initials - RWH - before choosing my first and middle names).   So, what's the problem? Ambiguity.   Take SMS, for example - System-Managed Storage on the mainframe, Short Message Service on your cell phone.   Or SMP - aka SMP/E on the mainframe, the primary way we install and maintain software. In the distributed world, it stands for Symmetric Multi-Processing. To make it even weirder, I recently heard Parallel Sysplexes being referred to as SMP environments... referring to the second of these meanings!   Even CA isn't immune to this - we have an internal Technical Sales Organization which is called TSO. I've recommended we call the mainframe portion of it "TSO/E".   So, what are we going to do about it? IDK (LOL) I guess I'm just going to rant and then put up with it... RU2?   Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! Posted Jul 04 2008, 09:51 AM by Reg Harbeck with no comments