Kitz Forum
Chat => Tech Chat => Topic started by: parkdale on April 06, 2020, 11:40:59 AM
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Ok it's time to dust off your programming skills ;)
https://www.cbronline.com/news/cobol-help-new-jersey
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I can remember being sent on Cobol training courses, but never got the chance to deploy these skills, preferring assembler. Maybe I should find the course notes, see if any of it sunk in? ;D
My first ever encounter with computer languages was an after-hours electronics club at school, late 1960s iirc. A local tech college let us send them Fortran coding sheets, then posted back the output a few days later, along with the punched cards from the coding sheets. It felt like rocket science.
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I’m still in demand then! Enjoyed (most of) my 35 years working in legacy systems from 1980 until retirement. Decided after Y2K to stick with it, at a time when many colleagues & peers were scrambling to get “new skills” (e.g. SAP, client/server etc). Good old COBOL (& IMS/DL1, CICS, DB2) on IBM big iron gave me a good living until I “hung up my coding pencil”...
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I also did a fair bit of COBOL programming as my first step up from computer operator in an IBM 360/65 shop. I self-taught during spare time on night shift between loading tapes and feeding endless boxes of paper into the 1403s! I also dabbled in PL/1 and Assembler too, but struggled with the JCL to run the programs. I was pulled off shift by the Systems Programming team who wanted someone to write some (simple) COBOL applications using JDS on the newly installed IMS system. Pioneering and extremely fulfilling times. :)
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I never did COBOL. Did Pascal and Z80 asm on my own at university. All my physics coursework was done in Pascal because they had made the amazing mistake of explicitly saying that any programming language was ok. And the when I became a full time programmer (at Psion) it was all asm for four years; Z80, then Hitachi 6301 (enhanced Motorola 6801); then C after that. I also did a tiny bit of 68000 and VAX asm.
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After I had qualified as competent, in COBOL programming, I only ever professionally wrote one COBOL program. :D
There were (and are) lots of other interesting things one can do with a computer. ;)
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Indeed. I wrote a few system exits in assembler which were much more pleasurable than coding "perform naughty-bits thru sleepy-time" to alleviate the boredom! However, the possibility of any processing exception in said exit was much more frightening than a S0C7 abend in some print routine!
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It’s all coming out of the woodwork now ! I’m pleased there are other asm programmers out there.
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Yes, I still have a copy of the IBM Enterprise Systems Architecture/370 Reference Summary which I have to admit looks quite baffling now. :(
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/370/referenceCard/GX20-0406-0_Enterprise_Systems_Architecture_370_Reference_Summary_Feb89.pdf (http://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/370/referenceCard/GX20-0406-0_Enterprise_Systems_Architecture_370_Reference_Summary_Feb89.pdf)
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::)
Why do we keep these things?
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Why indeed. I also have an AIX Quick Reference from my later work on RS/6000 and p series enterprise servers, but that has nothing to do with COBOL! ::)
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I trained as a Cobol programmer on ICL System 4 (it used the same machine code set as the IBM 360) in 1974 at North Eastern Electricity Board in Newcastle when they were just starting to develop systems using COBOL. A couple of years later a was moved in to the maintenance team and had to learn Usercode - hence the 370 reference summary.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Electric_System_4 for information about the ICL System 4.
The non-privileged instruction set of the System 4-50 and 4-70 included the integer, floating-point, character, and decimal instructions—in short, the full non-privileged instruction set of the IBM System 360, except for Test and Set (TS).[10] The ICL System 4-30 included the half-word instructions, LH, AH, SH, MH, and divide halfword (DH), etc., but not the fullword instructions L, A, etc.
I still remember the "backaxle" command (BXLE) - you gained real kudos if you (a) understood it and (b) used it in a real application (but would later get moans from colleagues if they had to do any work on that section of code).
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Ah yes the old green card! Got several of those somewhere going right back to an old IBM System/360 version that was (I think) printed double sided on A4 card and folded out. Later versions were yellow cover booklet style. Kept for nostalgia I suppose. Dumped pretty much everything else - old language compiler reference manuals etc.
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I was also made the programmer that looked after the key to disk systems - three MDS 2400 systems with around 80 girls keying. I've just found a brochure for them: http://s3data.computerhistory.org/brochures/mds.2400.1975.102646172.pdf - at the spec. on page 15!
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Thanks vic0239 for reminding me of the joys of S0C7/abends and dump cracking!
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:) A S0C7 was easy to debug, a S0C4 was another matter entirely! :o
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I loved them all! S0C7, S0C4 were most commonly occurred. Easy to solve when you knew how to locate the offending instruction though! Happy days...
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Suddenly I’m feeling like a real youngster.
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I can't say I've ever written assembler though I do have a more than passing acquaintance with disassembling and debugging it.
Purely for curiosity, nothing at all to do with poking at binary DRMs ;)
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When I first started out as an applications programmer, the first thing we were taught was IBM Basic Assembler Language (BAL)! We did that for a couple of weeks and then moved on to be taught how to write COBOL. The key lesson we took away was that, of course, at the end of the day COBOL is just a high-level language that still has to be turned into Assembler and that, for the majority of folk, COBOL is quicker & easier to write and to understand than BAL! Hence, depending on compiler options, a COBOL listing (on IBM S/360 etc) would include an equivalent BAL listing of the COBOL source code (handy for debugging). Do tell me to stop if I’m boring you... :D
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I think COBOL was the last language I learned in college. I found it to be an interesting language compared to the others I'd done (BASIC and Pascal).