ISPF
The full-screen, menu-driven workbench most people use to do their day-to-day work on z/OS.
Also written Interactive System Productivity Facility
ISPF, or Interactive System Productivity Facility, is the environment where most mainframe work actually happens. It sits on top of TSO and turns a bare command line into a set of menus, panels and tools.
From the main menu you reach everything you need day to day: browsing and editing datasets, managing files, comparing members, searching across a library, submitting jobs and looking at their output. Each function has a number, and experienced users navigate by typing sequences of them without reading the menus at all.
The editor is the piece you will use most. It works on lines rather than characters, with commands typed directly on the line numbers, and it is fast once learned.
ISPF is old, and it looks it. But it is also stable, consistent across every site you will ever work at, and available on any system you can log on to. Learning it is the difference between finding the mainframe impenetrable and finding it ordinary.
Related terms
- TSOTime Sharing Option: the interactive login environment on z/OS, where you get a command prompt and a session of your own.
- ISPF editorThe full-screen text editor used to write and change JCL, COBOL, REXX and anything else held in a dataset.
- ISPF panelA single screen within ISPF, whether a menu, a list or a form, identified by a number you can jump straight to.
- PF keysThe function keys F1 to F24, which carry the main actions on a mainframe screen: help, exit, save, page up and down.
- DatasetWhat a mainframe calls a file: a named collection of records with a defined structure, rather than a loose stream of bytes.