COBOL on HPUX

Jerry Feldman gaf.linux at gmail.com
Tue Jan 7 11:36:30 EST 2020


My first few programming jobs was as a COBOL programmer on both Burroughs
and IBM  mainframes in the 1970s. I even was able to have lunch with Grace
Hopper. In college I learned Fortran and BASIC. And pdp 8 assembler. I got
a copy of the original K&R and learned C to wean me from COBOL. As a
contractor I did have 1 COBOL assignment on HP-UX.

--
Jerry Feldman <gaf.linux at gmail.com>
Boston Linux and Unix http://www.blu.org
PGP key id: 6F6BB6E7
PGP Key fingerprint: 0EDC 2FF5 53A6 8EED 84D1  3050 5715 B88D 6F6
B B6E7

On Mon, Jan 6, 2020, 11:26 PM Bill Ricker <bill.n1vux at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> 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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>
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