Did you also get a 1099 at the end of the year for that?
Plus I love my tablet.
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Calvin Guan (news) wrote:
>> //SYSUT2 DD DSN=NEWFILE,
>> // DISP=(NEW,CATLG,DELETE),
>> // SPACE=(CYL,(40,5),RLSE),
>> // DCB=(LRECL=115,BLKSIZE=1150)
>> //SYSIN DD DUMMYWas the “Caps Lock” stuck? I feel nervous when reading all caps.
Mainframe programmers shouted a lot.
Actually, the coding scheme used for punched cards (the universal input
mechanism of the time) did not have lower case letters. They
essentially used a 6-bit character set. It wasn’t until the advent of
terminals that lower case became interesting.
–
Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.
Gary Little wrote:
Nope, that most likely was generated to a printer AFTER having been
punched into cards, using the EBCDC character set, where lowercase was
defined but seldom, if ever used. At that time you (we!?!?!) were
lucky if you (we!?!?!) had a teletype, running at a MIGHTY SPEEDY 60
words per second, about 300 baud.
The nearly universal Teletype ASR33 actually ran a blistering 110 baud,
10 characters per second. They were very good exercise for the fingers.
–
Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.
“One might ask why the “copy” command would be called “IEBGENER”, but one
would not get an answer.”
System utilities had 3-letter prefixes which apparently meant something. I remember IEB. For example, linker was IEBLNKEDT, or something like that.
Gad! I don’t remember the scheme, but you’re right… the prefix WAS meaningful. The “IE” prefix was used for IBM-supplied utilities (the “I” for IBM, IIRC). The third letter (B, E, F, etc) was used to denote something about the memory model or something, IIRC??? The rest was the identifying name.
My favorite utility was “IEFBR14”… anybody remember that one? Great name, and a great utility. The “greatness” comes in when you realize that “BR 14” in 360 assemlber language is the equivalent of a “return” statement, which is all the utility program did. IEFBR14 was a “dummy” utility that did nothing, but JUST let you execute JCL or ASP code in your job.
I really, really, don’t want to be remembering this stuff.
Peter
OSR
xxxxx@osr.com wrote:
I really, really, don’t want to be remembering this stuff.
It’s amazing how this stuff poisons our brains. The default executable
file name produced by the compilers on Control Data mainframes used to
be LGO, short for for “load and go”. To this day, the batch files that
I use to copy a driver into system32 and restart it are called “LGO.BAT”.
–
Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.
I learned to type on a Teletype, which is why I can’t really type at all
(in spite of several attempts over the years at learning to properly
touch type 
–mkj
On 5/11/2012 2:06 PM, Tim Roberts wrote:
Gary Little wrote:
> Nope, that most likely was generated to a printer AFTER having been
> punched into cards, using the EBCDC character set, where lowercase was
> defined but seldom, if ever used. At that time you (we!?!?!) were
> lucky if you (we!?!?!) had a teletype, running at a MIGHTY SPEEDY 60
> words per second, about 300 baud.The nearly universal Teletype ASR33 actually ran a blistering 110 baud,
10 characters per second. They were very good exercise for the fingers.
–
//
// Michael K. Jones
// Stone Hill Consulting, LLC
// http://www.stonehill.com
//_______________________________________________
Lowercase? That’s a modern invention! Back in the Good Old Days, when we
had to walk barefoot through the snow to pick up our computer output from
the computer center, EVERYTHING was in uppercase. I wasn’t able to use
lowercase until the early 1970s, and even then, we had to deal with so
many model 33 KSR teletypes that I would have to type
?FRED SAID “?I AM GOING TO ?PITTSBURGH, DOES ANYONE WANT TO COME??”
?NOBODY ANSWERED.
This was stored in the computer as
Fred said “I am going to Pittsburgh, does anyone want to come?” Nobody
answered.
The ?-escape was recognized by our text editor as meaning “the other case”
and you could default to lowercase or uppercase. In uppercase, the
standard setting, that would have been
F?R?E?D ?S?A?I?D "I ?A?M…
but you get the idea. A great deal of documentation was typed in using
this technique. Our line printer could print only uppercase, but the
ancient laser printer (cutting edge technology, we had one of only six in
existence, so old that they didn’t even have lasers) could print bold,
italics, and in several fonts, but it took two lines to do the font-switch
and you could have only two fonts at a time (regular and bold, or regular
and italic, so you couldn’t have bold and italic on the same line). I
wrote the first or second (depending on some fine points of measurement)
document-formatting program for a (pre-)laser printer, in 1969.
Back in the days of the Teletype, AT&T did a study to see whether
lowercase or uppercase was more readable. There was no real contest:
lowercase won. But the president of AT&T refused to allow lower-case-only
because it would then be impossible to spell the name “God” properly
capitalized, and that would be disrespectful.
Superstition will trump intelligence every time. My mind is made up,
don’t confuse me with facts.
joe
Calvin Guan (news) wrote:
> >> //SYSUT2 DD DSN=NEWFILE,
> >> // DISP=(NEW,CATLG,DELETE),
> >> // SPACE=(CYL,(40,5),RLSE),
> >> // DCB=(LRECL=115,BLKSIZE=1150)
> >> //SYSIN DD DUMMY
>
> Was the “Caps Lock” stuck? I feel nervous when reading all caps.Mainframe programmers shouted a lot.
Actually, the coding scheme used for punched cards (the universal input
mechanism of the time) did not have lower case letters. They
essentially used a 6-bit character set. It wasn’t until the advent of
terminals that lower case became interesting.–
Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.
NTDEV is sponsored by OSR
For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
http://www.osr.com/seminarsTo unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
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> System utilities had 3-letter prefixes which apparently meant something.
Was AS/400 also running the same OS as the 360 mainframes?
–
Maxim S. Shatskih
Windows DDK MVP
xxxxx@storagecraft.com
http://www.storagecraft.com
I shall be having nightmares for days, now, with all this coming back.
The memory models were A, B, …, H, I, …
I think G was 64K, because there were two compilers, Fortran-G which was
pretty vanilla FORTRAN with no optimization, and Fortran-H which required
more memory, had excellent optimization, and frequently crashed during
compilation or at runtime (due to bad optimization). So the rule was get
the program running under FORTRAN-G and then compile it with FORTRAN-H so
it would run faster (if at all).
I worked for a company that sent an RFP to IBM to buy a /360. They came
back to us with a C-level configuration that cost only slighly more than
our 1440. But our RFP clearly said “COBOL shall be the language of
choice”, and the COBOL compiler would not run on anything less than D, and
the generated programs required an E-level machine. Real bait-and-switch;
we were so pissed off we got a Honeywell 200 series, which supported full
COBOL of the time (1968) and could run it on a 32K system.
Memory cost real money in those days. It was made of little magnetic
donuts. I discovered later that the father of a friend of mine was IBM’s
core memory wizard, and saved the company by inventing a 750ns core memory
system, in the early 1960s.
And the operating system was IBM DOS (no relation to the system used on
the PCs, except for using the same letters in the same order to name it)
joe
Gad! I don’t remember the scheme, but you’re right… the prefix WAS
meaningful. The “IE” prefix was used for IBM-supplied utilities (the “I”
for IBM, IIRC). The third letter (B, E, F, etc) was used to denote
something about the memory model or something, IIRC??? The rest was the
identifying name.My favorite utility was “IEFBR14”… anybody remember that one? Great
name, and a great utility. The “greatness” comes in when you realize that
“BR 14” in 360 assemlber language is the equivalent of a “return”
statement, which is all the utility program did. IEFBR14 was a “dummy”
utility that did nothing, but JUST let you execute JCL or ASP code in your
job.I really, really, don’t want to be remembering this stuff.
Peter
OSR
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Oh, heck, no. That was a NEW machine. It ran either it’s own weird OS (OS/400) or AIX.
The old crap we’re talking about dates back to OS/360…
Now I’m starting to remember ORVYL and WYLBUR for remote job submission, which predate even TSO. Some things will just NOT die from one’s memory: “x fro #loc use pgv gro ow on cat clr” – It doesn’t even matter what that is, but I can assure you that I haven’t been able to forget that line (having typed it probably thousands of times waiting for my job to run).
PLEASE make it stop. The memories are *really* disturbing… ARRRGH!
Peter
OSR
My understanding is the PDC has been renamed because it was considered too
“elitist” to suggest that “professional” developers only should attend.
So I heard that is that the content was watered down (which is hard to
imagine, given that PDC sessions were pure sucralose, 0 carbs, 0 calories,
etc. which is why I stopped going years ago), so that it is
newbie-friendly. What I was seeing was an overemphasis on HTMLn for
various values of n, Silverlight, distributed network apps, writing client
applets in C#, and tons of other things that were of no conceivable
interest to me or the client base I had. Now that I’m officially retired,
I probably wouldn’t attend it even if it were held here in Pittsburgh.
And I were given free admission.
joe
Sorry, but the presentations are at best WinHEC Lite, and most of us who
have been in the community for a long time felt WinHEC already was
“Lite”. I considered the PDC to be worthless for a long time, and
adding a little WinHEC content and saying it solves the needs of the
community is ridiculous.Don Burn
Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting
Website: http://www.windrvr.com
Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr“xxxxx@gmail.com” wrote in message
> news:xxxxx@ntdev:
>
>> I got a lot from Build. Maybe the content leaned more towards pdc than
>> winhec but there was a lot of it that was new because of WinRT. I also
>> really appreciate that it’s available on line. Compared to how Apple
>> treats their development community when their wwdc sells out in 2 hours
>> and if you don’t get in you’re out of luck, MS does a great job.
>>
>> Plus I love my tablet.
>
>
> —
> NTDEV is sponsored by OSR
>
> For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
> http://www.osr.com/seminars
>
> To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
> http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
>
> Oh, heck, no. That was a NEW machine. It ran either it’s own weird OS (OS/400) or AIX.
And what were the applications which could be executed on this Application System/400?
DB/2?
–
Maxim S. Shatskih
Windows DDK MVP
I believe so, yes. Then again, I’ve never used an AS/400 (though, believe it or not, OSR has actually written a driver suite that runs on AIX on *I THINK* the AS/400… in just about every post office in the United States).
Peter
OSR
Maxim S. Shatskih wrote:
> Oh, heck, no. That was a NEW machine. It ran either it’s own weird OS (OS/400) or AIX.
And what were the applications which could be executed on this Application System/400?DB/2?
DB2 is still a very hot application for IBM. That’s the primary
application used on “System z”, which is their latest mainframe, and
which will actually run most S/370 and even S/360 assembly programs
unchanged.
–
Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.
> Memory cost real money in those days. It was made of little magnetic
donuts.
On IBM/360? really? (I think Soviet clones used small chips…)
And the operating system was IBM DOS
And there was also “OS” (without “D”) which was more capable, and later some VM hypervisor (MVS?).
BTW - what does “mainframe” mean? can you compare the PDP-11 which was called “mini” and IBM/360 (which was called “mainframe”) of the same time? Were /360s really much more powerful?
–
Maxim S. Shatskih
Windows DDK MVP
xxxxx@storagecraft.com
http://www.storagecraft.com
We had an interactive editor that allowed users of the remote job entry
system we had to edit their source files. It turns out there was NO
DOCUMENTED WAY to open a file by name from an application, or create a
file by name from an application. Everything was done with the DD
commands, and you referenced the DDname (SYSPRINT, SYSUT1, etc.) from the
application. One of our programmers studied the OS source, found the
undocumented APIs, and used them. IBM was immensely upset that anyone
would DARE to create something that let an ordinary app open or create a
file by name. That was what JCL was all about!
(Historical note: JCL had the property that it established all resource
requirements in the command language. So the job scheduler (not the
timeslicer, what’s a timeslice?) could make sure all the resources
required were available. This might involved tape mounts, making sure
there was enough space on the disk drive, etc., and if the constraints
could not be met, the job would not be scheduled).
OS/360 had several flavors: OS/SP (Single program, or some similar acronym
starting with S), OS/MFT (Multiprogramming with a Fixed number of Tasks),
OS/MVC (delivered years late, Multiprogramming with a Variable number of
Tasks), and one wag, in a parody, had OS/MVC, Multiprogramming with a
Variable number of CPUs (today, that would make perfect sense!). We used
OS/MFT, where the “fixed” tasks were “the current application” (you could
run one at a time, sort of like MS-DOS), HASP (the Houston Automatic
Spooling Program, part of RJE), and the Editor task, the one we wrote at
CMU, which was one task that did its own multiplexiing of incoming
requests from users.
By the time OS/MVT was delivered, CP/CMS, developed at IBM’s Cambridge
research lab, had taken over; it ran each partition as a Virtual Machine.
My eyes are fine, but my brain is melting, melting…
joe
OMG is RIGHT. I didn’t even *recognize* Joe’s reference until Maria named
it.OH, my eyes… MY EYES!!!
There’s a great example on Wikipedia that brought back a lot of scary
memories (but no WAY I could have written this from memory)://IS198CPY JOB (IS198T30500),‘COPY JOB’,CLASS=L,MSGCLASS=X
//COPY01 EXEC PGM=IEBGENER
//SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT=*
//SYSUT1 DD DSN=OLDFILE,DISP=SHR
//SYSUT2 DD DSN=NEWFILE,
// DISP=(NEW,CATLG,DELETE),
// SPACE=(CYL,(40,5),RLSE),
// DCB=(LRECL=115,BLKSIZE=1150)
//SYSIN DD DUMMYFor those of you who never had the privilege of working on an IBM 360,
this was how you copied a file. Seriously. You might think “copy OLDFILE
NEWFILE” would be enough… but NO!Peter
OSR(and let us not forget //*)
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> I believe so, yes. Then again, I’ve never used an AS/400
I saw AS/400 only at one of my former employer’s in 1994, the company was trying to sell them in Russia.
They also had an AIX box, which used PowerPC CPU and was very much like Sun Sparc in everything.
Dunno whether AS/400 used PowerPC.
–
Maxim S. Shatskih
Windows DDK MVP
xxxxx@storagecraft.com
http://www.storagecraft.com
An IBM/360 model 50 was about the same performance as an 8088, is my
recollection. It was incredibly fast for its day, but its day was 1963.
When I first started to use one, in 1967, it was already considered
obsolete.
My next IBM mainframe was the 360 model 67, which ran TSS/360, one of the
early timesharing systems. TSS was massive, slow, and clunky, and if you
ran, as we did, 40-60 users on it, an 8088 would have looked blisteringly
fast by comparison. The 67 was a 65 with a memory map attached (the TLB
was of size 8, because the maximum number of pages one instruction could
cover was 6, and 8 was the next higher power). It had 750ns main memory
and 8us “bulk memory”, which we used instead of a paging drum. We had a
DMA access between the bulk memory and the main memory (of which we had
768K, one of the largest mainframe memories around, and a special order
since the 65/67 normally had a max of 512K) but discovered, ultimately,
that it was faster to execute code in the dead-slow 8us memory than to
page it it, because the paging overhead was so high. In the mid-1970s, we
replaced the 8us IBM memory with 2us Ampex core, but the bus still ran at
8us.
A 360/67 was about the same instruction performance as a PDP-11, but the
difference between mainframes and minis at the time was largely in I/O
throughput. A 360 equipped with a multiplexor channel could push more
bits per second through the CPU than a PDP-11 could support as an external
peripheral. Even today, the “mainframes” hold the blue ribbon in I/O
throughput, although it is now often measured in gigabytes/second.
We did not see solid state memory on computers until the late 1970s; prior
to that, everything was core. Our PDP-11s all used core memory. Our DEC
KL-10, a huge, fast ECL machine (1MIPS, screamingly fast for 1973 or so),
used core.
In the last week of the semester (as every student was trying to get their
programs running by end-of-semester), one of our engineers (we had
purchased the /360 by that time) decided to change the memory timing so
the bulk memory bus cycled at 2us instead of 8us, so we’d get 4x
performance from the bulk memory. The result was the whole machine went
down for a week, prompting this song (to “I’ve got rhythm”)
I’ve got DECtapes,
I’ve got magtapes,
I’ve got disk packs,
But has anybody seen my core?
Someone fiddled,
someone diddled,
Someone piddled,
Now no core!
(There are several more verses, but you get the idea)
joe
> Memory cost real money in those days. It was made of little magnetic
> donuts.On IBM/360? really? (I think Soviet clones used small chips…)
> And the operating system was IBM DOS
And there was also “OS” (without “D”) which was more capable, and later
some VM hypervisor (MVS?).BTW - what does “mainframe” mean? can you compare the PDP-11 which was
called “mini” and IBM/360 (which was called “mainframe”) of the same time?
Were /360s really much more powerful?–
Maxim S. Shatskih
Windows DDK MVP
xxxxx@storagecraft.com
http://www.storagecraft.com
NTDEV is sponsored by OSR
For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
http://www.osr.com/seminarsTo unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
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I had a friend who worked at the IBM Rochester (Minnesota) facility, where
the AS/400 was designed, manufactured, and programmed. He was a leader of
one of the software teams.
My understanding in talking to him is that the AS/400 was its own
instruction set and architecture, its own operating system, and shared
nothing with any other IBM product.
In recent years, the AS/400 has used a variant of the PowerPC chips, but
originally it was its own CPU architecture. The “assembly code” is
actually a byte code which the original architecture executed directly,
but now it is JIT-compiled into RISC instructions.
This division was all that kept IBM alive in the early 1990s, when they
had posted a US$5,000,000,000 loss, the largest loss any US company had
ever posted at that point in time (it was overshadowed a few months later
when General Motors posted a loss of US$7,500,000,000, but it turns out
that the GM loss was a “paper loss” caused by a change in how taxes were
calculated, so they were no longer able to write off some capital
investments sooner than expected. IBM really lost five billion dollars).
I was working at CMU in a research group supported by an IBM contract, and
the contract evaporated at the end of the year, disemploying about 30
people.
joe
> I believe so, yes. Then again, I’ve never used an AS/400
I saw AS/400 only at one of my former employer’s in 1994, the company was
trying to sell them in Russia.They also had an AIX box, which used PowerPC CPU and was very much like
Sun Sparc in everything.Dunno whether AS/400 used PowerPC.
–
Maxim S. Shatskih
Windows DDK MVP
xxxxx@storagecraft.com
http://www.storagecraft.com
NTDEV is sponsored by OSR
For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
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