Interactive System Productivity Facility ISPF is a software product for IBM mainframes running the zOS operating system. It includes a screen editor, the user interface of which was emulated by some microcomputer editors sold commercially starting in the late 1980s including SPFPC.
ISPF primarily provides an IBM 3270 terminal interface with a set of panels. Each panel may include menus and dialogs to run tools on the underlying Time Sharing Option TSO. Generally, these panels just provide a convenient interface to do tasks most of them execute modules of IBM mainframe utility programs to do the actual work. ISPF is frequently used to manipulate zOS data sets via its Product Development Facility ISPFPDF.
ISPF is user-extensible and it is often used as an application program interface. Many vendors have created products for MVS that use the ISPF interface. An early version was called merely SPF and introduced in MVS system. Originally this stood for Structured Programming Facility, since it was introduced about the same time as structured programming concepts, but later the name was changed to System Productivity Facility
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