Same here. I learned on my own, under the tutelage of an expert in my first job, then spent 9 years at Amdahl taking their excellent courses and getting lots of practice on customer dumps. Ended up as an instructor at Amdahl before things went awry with that company ...
I believe that Techknowledge Corporation is the spin-off of the old Amdahl Edcuation group and still teaches updated versions of many of those internals and dump classes. Joey Capps -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Tom Marchant Sent: Monday, July 29, 2013 1:43 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: 3 job openings for mainframe Assembler/C programmers, dump readers On Thu, 25 Jul 2013 23:59:49 -0500, William H. Blair wrote: >Don V Nielsen asks: > >| Where might one one find good instruction on how to read a dump? > >For the most part, everybody I know that's any good at it got that way >all on their own (they may have taken a class from IBM or Amdahl back >when they were young and green, however...) When I was getting started as a Cobol programmer in 1970, I was given a paper with a title something like "Newspaper approach to dump reading". It was based upon a journalist's basic questions, who, what, when, where, why and how, that are necessary in any investigation. That document helped me get started reading SYSABEND dumps of my simple programs. I have no idea where it came from, but I wonder if it might have come from SHARE. Then, as an Amdahl SE, I attended classes in MVS internals and diagnosis. During my years there, I must have analyzed hundreds of dumps. Most of them were SVC dumps, but also the occasional stand-alone dump. In those pre-XA days, the dumps that I examined were all on paper. Today, I use IPCS. I have mentored some to help them with their dump analysis skills. A few have become quite competent at it. -- Tom Marchant
