We're going to move a little bit into the user-facing space now with ISPF and TSO. ISPF is the Interactive System Productivity Facility, and TSO is the Time Sharing Option. These are two separate products, both of which run on the mainframe in the z/OS operating system, and a short detour here about acronyms. We just talked about ISPF, and I told you that it stands for the Interactive System Productivity Facility. Now, I had to look that up because I have literally never called it the Interactive System Productivity Facility, it's always just been ISPF, and you'll probably never hear anybody say Time Sharing Option either, it's just TSO. What I'm getting at here is that you shouldn't worry about memorizing what things stand for, unless they help you remember it, like PCHID, the P in the front of PCHID reminds me that it's the physical channel path identifier. But you'll probably notice that we go through a lot of acronyms here, and I just don't need a stress about memorizing things. What's important is what they are, and ISPF is a fullscreen, menu-driven interface, which lets you access z/OS tools and utilities. So instead of memorizing commands and parameters, you can just navigate to a panel built specifically for the task you want to do and enter the options you want. TSO runs behind ISPF supporting it, and it's typically used for one word or one line commands. So for most tasks, you've got the option of either doing it through TSO or ISPF. When you first connect to a mainframe using a terminal emulator, you're greeted by a TSO logon screen. Top of the screen, you may notice this little /E at the end of TSO, and you wondering what that is. That means it's TSO extensions, which has a few improvements over the original TSO, but again, most people just call it TSO. You log in to TSO with a username and a password. So we need to move our cursor over to the Userid field, and put in our user ID, and then there's the Password field right over here, do the same thing with the password. Many of these fields will be filled out with the default values when you get there, and if they are, you're probably okay just to leave them like that. A quick word about navigating to fields. The easiest way to move from field to field is by hitting the Tab key, and you can go the other direction by hitting Shift+tab. If you try to use your mouse to select the fields you want to type in, it's really easy to click in the wrong spot, and then you'll wind up putting texts where you didn't mean to. So for a lot of what we're going to be doing, just use your keyboard. So now, you've got your user ID and your password in there, and below that we've got this Procedure field. This is the procedure that kicks off when you start your TSO session, this is usually set up for you by someone who knows what they're doing. So it's best not to change it, unless you really need to, or someone tells you to, and even then make sure you make a note of what I said before in case you need to change it back. The account number is used to track system usage, and the Size field determines the amount of memory that you're TSO session gets. Perform is there in case you want to associate your TSO session with a set of performance characteristics, which can be helpful for WLM, and then there's Command, this tells TSO what you wanted to do once you're logged in. You may be prompted to change your password or you may us feel like changing your password, to do that, enter your current password in the password field and put your new password over in the new password field. You will then be prompted to enter the same password again, just to make sure you typed out what you meant to type. The group identification field can be used to log in to another group and access a different set of resources. If that's done, it'll typically be done by the security administrator. Then down here, we've got four options, to select any one of these options place an S to select it in the space before it. So if you put an S before Nomail, TSO will suppress the message is intended for you specifically, during the login process. Put an S in front of Nonotice, and that says, "You don't want to see any of the messages intended for all users." Next, if you ever accidentally close your terminal window, there's a chance it'll notice this and close up your session safely, but if for whatever reason you're trying to log in, and it's telling you that your session is already in use, you can select this and it will reconnect you to that previously running session. Then there's OIDcard. You can use this to enter data using your Operator Identification Card if you have one of those. All right, now, we're in ISPF, let's see what we got. Up top, we've got the Action Bar. This works just like a menu in anything else you've ever used. Then there's a Command Line that lets you type at any commands that you know. This may also be located at the bottom of the screen instead of the top, some people like it down there, and they'll set it up that way. Next, there's this big listing of Panel Options, and these show you all the panels that you can go to in ISPF. So if you wan to go to dialogue test, for example, you would put a seven on the command line and then hit Enter, because seven is the number on the panel options for dialogue test. At the bottom, there's a listing of function keys. These remind you of what you can do using the function or f-keys on your keyboard. For example, F7 goes backward, and F8 goes forward when you're working on a program, or a file that's bigger than your screen will fit. Now, if you're looking down at your keyboard and wondering what are these function f-keys all about. They're usually in the row above where your numbers are, and if you don't have that row or they look a little bit different, you might have to use a modifier key or remap some of these keys, but that's something you can explore during the labs. We also have this Dynamic status Area. This area can change, that's why it's called the Dynamic Status Area, and it's an area set aside in the panel configuration, and it's controlled by an ISPF variable. It's almost always used just to provide you with additional helpful information. So we're all done now, how do we disconnect? There's a couple of ways, I'm going to show you two. You can enter X on the command line or you can press F12, the cancel key. This will end ISPF, and put you back to a TSO command line because TSO is still running. It's not the same thing as ISPF, and if you want to go back into ISPF, just enter the command ISPF and hit Enter. To terminate TSO, enter the command logoff and hit Enter, and TSO will cleanly close down and disconnect you. But don't worry, we'll be back.
