<div dir="auto">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. <br><br><div data-smartmail="gmail_signature">--<br>Jerry Feldman <<a href="mailto:gaf.linux@gmail.com">gaf.linux@gmail.com</a>><br>Boston Linux and Unix <a href="http://www.blu.org">http://www.blu.org</a><br>PGP key id: 6F6BB6E7<br>PGP Key fingerprint: 0EDC 2FF5 53A6 8EED 84D1 3050 5715 B88D 6F6<br>B B6E7</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Jan 6, 2020, 11:26 PM Bill Ricker <<a href="mailto:bill.n1vux@gmail.com">bill.n1vux@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:georgia,serif"><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Jan 6, 2020 at 10:45 PM R. Anthony Lomartire <<a href="mailto:opensourcekeys@gmail.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">opensourcekeys@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">So I recently landed a job working in COBOL on HP-UX. It's been a trip! <br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div style="font-family:georgia,serif" class="gmail_default">HPUX is "interesting". <br></div><div style="font-family:georgia,serif" class="gmail_default">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.</div><div style="font-family:georgia,serif" class="gmail_default"> <br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">This stuff is from before my time but it's been really interesting to learn. Have any of you folks worked with this stuff? </div></blockquote><div><br><div style="font-family:georgia,serif" class="gmail_default">Well yes.</div><div style="font-family:georgia,serif" class="gmail_default"> 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!)<br></div></div><div style="font-family:georgia,serif" class="gmail_default"> 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.)</div><div style="font-family:georgia,serif" class="gmail_default"> (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)<br></div><div style="font-family:georgia,serif;margin-left:40px" class="gmail_default">CALL INPUT_FORM_ROUTINE</div><div style="font-family:georgia,serif;margin-left:40px" class="gmail_default"><i><br></i></div><div style="font-family:georgia,serif;margin-left:40px" class="gmail_default">IF <<i>validate input buffer field</i>> <br></div><div style="font-family:georgia,serif;margin-left:40px" class="gmail_default">COPY input7 TO output7 <br></div><div style="font-family:georgia,serif;margin-left:40px" class="gmail_default">ELSE SET ERROR_SEEN TO 1</div><div style="font-family:georgia,serif;margin-left:40px" class="gmail_default"><i></i><br><i>... lather rinse repeat 1 to 17 ... and then insert 13A between 13 and 14 after it's been in "production" for months.<br></i></div><div style="font-family:georgia,serif;margin-left:40px" class="gmail_default"><i></i><br>CALL WRITE_OUTPUT_TO_DBMS<br></div><div style="font-family:georgia,serif" class="gmail_default"><br></div><div style="font-family:georgia,serif" class="gmail_default">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?) <br>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.)<br></div><div style="font-family:georgia,serif" class="gmail_default"><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">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. :)</div></blockquote><div><br></div><div style="font-family:georgia,serif" class="gmail_default">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.) <br></div><div style="font-family:georgia,serif" class="gmail_default"><br></div><div style="font-family:georgia,serif" class="gmail_default">*Eventually = I think they finally finished??</div></div><br>-- <br><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">Bill Ricker<br><a href="mailto:bill.n1vux@gmail.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">bill.n1vux@gmail.com</a><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:georgia,serif"> <a href="mailto:bricker@theperlshop.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">bricker@theperlshop.com</a> </span><div><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/n1vux" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">https://www.linkedin.com/in/n1vux</a> <br></div></div></div></div>
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