Yes, I remember you, not personally, but seeing your name on a bunch of mods on the CBT tape. Good job at collecting and enhancing!
On 02/27/2010 10:11 PM, Jim Marshall wrote: > I have been following some discussions on Adventure, StarTrek, and other > games around back in the 20th Century. If you look on the CBT tape you will > find a number of Computer games from back in the 1970s; WUMPUS, > RoadRace, Eliza, Lunar Lander, etc. Thought it was about time to clue folks > in > on some events. Back in the 1970s the Air Force assigned me to the Pentagon > to work on an IBM 360-75J & OS/MVT/HASPIII. Along the way we were > blessed with the first IBM 303X shipped; namely a 3032 serial number 6. Along > with it came all the DASD and tape plus an IBM 3850 MSS (35GB) with a bunch > of Virtual IBM 3330 (100MB) drives. > > On both machines we implemented TSO with the IBM 360-75 turned into an > unclassified dial-up Time Sharing machine. I was on the hunt for utilities > and > TSO Command Processors to give us added functionality. I came across a tape > of computer games. It was tempting to try them out but whether the Air Force > would buy it was another story. So I went to my Air Force and DOD Civilian > management to ask if I could maintain the source code on our system. The > idea was to use it as barter for getting SHAREWARE or Open Source code > today. The position I took for all this code was it showed programmers how > one could write Interactive code. Some was in FORTRAN, COBOL, ALC, and > PL1/F. Plus some had a mix of languages. Yep, one language was calling > another language as a subroutine. Look at the code and a programmer is > jumpstarted seeing code which actually worked. Besides I could barter the > game code to entice others to send me their TSO CPS and utilities. They > actually agreed and I got myself 3-4 IBM 3330V disk packs in the MSS and I > was in business. The deal was to maintain the code, get to check it out and > it > was not to be played. Indeed I was the only one who was allowed into it. > > I had gone out to the keeper of the TSO Mods tape for SHARE and when he > returned to me an empty tape saying he did not have anything, I started > adding TSO CPs to the collection. Along the way I became the defacto keeper > of the TSO Mods tape. In the Washington DC area we had the Goddard Space > Flight Center along with other agencies with a bunch of great coders. Then > the Air Force hired a contractor from PRC named Bill Godfrey. He had a big > collection of code and as soon as it hit the Air Force computer, I asked if I > could amass it and distribute the code. Bill is the original creator of TSSO > and > the first I know to write code to schedule an SRB in ALC program and giving > the code away. > > So now I had TSO CPs, general Utilities and had picked up some tape utilities > from a prior assignment in Denver, CO adding to it the Game collection and I > could offer much in trade. I had distributed the TSO and Utilities to the > SHARE > and CBT tapes. The collection grew. Along the way I turned over the TSO > Game file to CBT and Sam Golob with the provision it was not to be publicized > it was coming from the US Air Force for it might cause others to question my > chiefs judgement. Sam did a great job, packaged it up and now it was saved > elsewhere besides on my IBM 3330V volumes. As happens in Washington, > Political Correctness happened and having even the source code on a system > was forbidden. Following orders the game collection was purged. But it lived > in > CBT land. > > I left the Pentagon in 1982 and headed to Texas taking along my OS/MVT DLIB > packs. Now MVS was well established and IBM was now charging for Fortran, > PLI, etc. So I unloaded my MVT DLIBs onto the IBM 4341 MVS system and > extracted and packaged up a number of IBM MVT (FREE) Compilers; FORTRAN- > G, FORTRAN-H, RPG, PL1/F, and maybe COBOL. I sent them off to Sam Golob > and now people had the compilers to use for the TSO games. In the 1990s, I > heard from a Blue Cross company they still were using IBM 360 RPG in > production systems. Sam engineered some magic to get the Fortran-H and > PL1/F compilers to run beyond MVS/XA. As I understand the Fortran-G and > RPG run unchanged even today. I understand he may have added PASCAL. > > My point in all of this is to thank all the people along the way who made the > effort to contribute the code. My part was just to get the code, check it > out, > figure out the installation, maybe document it and package it all and send it > out. It was impressive that in the Pentagon, management actually accepted > the story I told to go out and barter for code. It really did work. People > would > trade one program and get the whole collection. Then I would add their one > piece and it grew. Hopefully it continues today. > > Looking at others code gave me a leg up because having to invent code from > scratch is tough. Expanding others code is far easier. If one looks at what > the > Health Checker does and other ideas, most have come from folks like you. IBM > is not dumb for they look at all this code to and I am sure if someone had > access to IBM's code, traces of our free code would be seen. > > So in the days when you are thinking those in Washington are not responsive > to your needs, well, back when we felt your pain and did something about it > having great fun along the way. > > Jim Marshall > > P.S. Getting the first of a new generation of IBM computer, the IBM 3032, > made us a showplace besides being in the Pentagon. But 6 months later IBM > shipped the first IBM 3033 to Singer up in New Jersey, we were obsolete and > never got the IBM 3032-AP/MP we hoped would come. > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
