COBOL on HPUX

[Bill Ricker]

On Mon, Jan 6, 2020 at 10:45 PM R. Anthony Lomartire <
opensourcekeys at gmail.com> wrote:

> So I recently landed a job working in COBOL on HP-UX. It's been a trip!
>

HPUX is "interesting".
HP and IBM both made IT-friendly variants of Unix (previously it was just
an engineering OS; named "HPUX" and "AIX" respectively) long before POSIX
standardized the needed richer security/permissions features (e.g. ACLs),
and of course the other brands refused to bless either HPUX or AIX's
variations.  So life is odd on either of them.  I survived HPUX, and liked
AIX, when I had projects on them.

This stuff is from before my time but it's been really interesting to
> learn. Have any of you folks worked with this stuff?
>

Well yes.
   I coached a couple of girlfriends through the COBOL assignment in their
Survey of Languages courses in '79-'80, using an already obsolete IBM 1401
user manual, without having taken the course or studied COBOL more than
casual reading. (They both passed, and I'm still married to one of them!)
    Then in 1981, i was paid to "write" (tweaked copy-pasta reuse) 2 lines
of COBOL on the TOPS-10 PDP-10 at DOT VOLPE center, to add field 13 A to
the processing for a form, after adding 13 A between 13 and 14 in the
Screen Painter and the DBMS schema. (And dump and reload the data of
course.)
   (We were the Fortran department, but our previous DB guru was bilingual
and noticed that the Cobol/DP dept had gotten a Form-painter application
that worked on glass terminals in block mode, to get away from literally
keypunching data on cards, and it only supported COBOL -- would generate a
DATASECT and an object to link to; and our DBMS System 1022 also generated
a DATASECT for COBOL (and did similar for Fortran), so it was a small
matter of  (pseudocode cobol)
CALL INPUT_FORM_ROUTINE

IF <*validate input buffer field*>
COPY input7 TO output7
ELSE SET ERROR_SEEN TO 1


*... lather rinse repeat 1 to 17 ... and then insert 13A between 13 and 14
after it's been in "production" for months.*

CALL WRITE_OUTPUT_TO_DBMS

The DEC PDP-10 had 36 bit words, so DEC TOPS COBOL had 6 x 6-bit ASCII
UPPER CASE CHARACTERS PER WORD. (WHO NEEDS LOWER CASE?)
DEC TOPS Fortran by contrast had discovered mixed case and had 5 x 7-bit
ASCII per word. (But the bit left over was mantissa lsb, not sign, so was
pretty much useless as a out of band marker.)

We're looking to migrate away eventually, maybe anyone with experience
> there? I'd love to hear any stories about COBOL or old enterprise mainframe
> applications you've worked with. We're probably going to be hiring soon too
> if anyone would be interested in a similar gig. :)
>

Early in the new century, my old financials shop was looking to replace two
overlapping business critical applications, one Mainframe COBOL and one VMS
COBOL,  with something new.  (We'd already replaced the PL/1 application
running on Stratus.) Eventually* instead of paying a vendor to upgrade
their Unix/Linux C++ app with Java UI to handle the needed features, the
vendor for the IBM M/F COBOL app added the features needed to retire the
VMS app.  (I didn't directly touch the Mainframe, but dealt with the
problems of transferring LRECL EBCDIC files to CRLF ASCII Unix/Linux hosts
and vice versa, as well as App/OS/HW interface/capacity issues on
Unix/Linux platforms. Much hilarity with file transfers.)

*Eventually = I think they finally finished??

-- 
Bill Ricker
bill.n1vux at gmail.com bricker at theperlshop.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/n1vux
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