17 Sep
2013
17 Sep
'13
4:24 p.m.
On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 12:37 AM, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
I've dealt with some companies that only had a System/3x, and others that
also had mainframes. In the latter group, I never heard of any plans to use
the System/3x as a backup for any of the mainframe workload, though I
suppose in some circumstances that might have been possible. One company
ran some of their COBOL and Fortran programs on their local System/36
because they got shorter turnaround time running them locally than by
submitting RJE jobs to the remote mainframe. They used RJE for the jobs
that were too large or too computationally intensive for the System/36. I
think they also did some of their COBOL development on the System/36 for
programs eventually intended to run on the System/370, though obviously you
can't do that if the COBOL program will use mainframe facilities
unavailable on the System/36.
Eric
On 09/16/2013 10:35 PM, Eric Smith wrote:
I'm not sure what you mean. In addition to RPG, IBM sold or leased COBOL
and Fortran compilers for the machines, and customers did in fact use
them. The data was almost always in EBCDIC, but so what? AFAIK, the only
common programming language that mandated any particular pre-Unicode
character set was Ada 83, for the predefined CHARACTER type and the ASCII
package in the standard environment, but nevertheless it was able to deal
with other character sets including EBCDIC, and AFAIK there wasn't an Ada
compiler for any System/3x.
Probably used by many installations as backup only.
While it's quite possible that they may have seen more use for RPG-II and
later, they were definitely general-purpose and were also used for COBOL
and Fortran.
The ones that I've seen have been strictly data--no programs, just lots
and lots of EBCDIC data.