Re: COBOL Compiler for Windows

On Thu, 1 May 2008 02:02:54 +1200, "Pete Dashwood"
<dashwood@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

IDCAMS is the utility to run this file management system. But
people were already familiar with the non-managed systems, and the
only place I've seen ESDS files was where I implemented them myself -
to replace the 9030 functionality.

ESDS (Entirely Superficial Data Storage) was fine for data entry, where you
could lose the odd item and re-enter it later, retrieval speed wasn't a big
priority and sequence wasn't a problem, but if you needed to find something
in a hurry, the last member of the VSAM family, RRDS (Really Righteous Data
Service), was the best. Unfortunately,figuring out the hashing algorithms to
make it work effectively, was a bit beyond the average programmer, so it
languished in a cupboard gathering dust...I once wrote an entire access
system based on it and everyone was very impressed... Dunno why, it was only
COBOL... :-)

Come to think of it, my RRDS experience was almost entirely in the
same project - moving our data-entry files from Univac 9030 to IBM. I
have never used non-RRDS relative files on IBM mainframes.

It was a really cool idea and I was blown away when I first encountered it.
Did everything Indexed Sequential did, but in less than half the time.
Perfect for online systems which were just starting to appear when it was
invented. It was multitasked and certain housekeeping functions ran in the
background without affecting performance in the foreground. It was developed
by Burroughs (the Unisys power of two that WASN'T Univac) and caused me to
realise (to my horror) that all the good IT ideas DIDN'T come out of IBM...
:-)

Compare WFL or DCL with JCL. Of course IBM wanted people to switch
to a REXX environment, but nobody listened (well, the techies used
REXX, but the JCL environment stayed).

I used an Amdahl operating system called Aspen, which I liked very
much.
.