Paul, I'm afraid you missed the emphasis in my reply. I was reacting to your "haven't tried assembler, but it intrigues me." statement from your earlier post. As I see "Anne & Lynn Wheeler" describing in some detail in a post which. for some reason, hasn't popped up in my - I almost said "reader" - "in-box", installing software was very heavily reliant on the assembler macro language even if you contrived to "punch" to some media other than cards and "submit" from there.
I tried to think when I last really used cards and then managed to "convert" to, well, something else, maybe VM/CMS with a guest VS1 system - thus, logically, I may still have been using cards - but memory fades with respect to these more trivial tasks. Probably my last efforts with the 029 and the 2540 was in 1976 in Oberedonaustrasse, Vienna. I must have started using VM shortly after that - and never punched a card thereafter :-) Come to think of it that's probably a significant moment in everyone's "mainframe" career - if your long enough in the teeth. Another aspect to my viewpoint is that, perhaps unlike John Gilmore, I started with the original DOS where using cards for the object, literally, deck was taken for granted. Tape wasn't always available and, in my DOS days, I can't recall DASD being an option - but maybe I just remember fanning nice new cards so that they didn't jam. :-) Chris Mason ----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul Gilmartin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main To: <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, 07 May, 2006 8:42 PM Subject: Re: rexx or other macro processor on z/os? > In a recent note, Chris Mason said: > > > Date: Sun, 7 May 2006 19:24:11 +0200 > > > > You are clearly rather new to this game - and you can be very, very thankful > > > many macros and submitted an assembler "compile". You then took the cards > > out of the card punch stacker, took a couple of steps round the 2540 card > > reader/punch and put the cards into the hopper. > > > Was this, then, even before passed data sets existed? There was no > other way to pass data from one job step to another? (Did jobs > even have multiple steps?) > > -- gil > -- > StorageTek > INFORMATION made POWERFUL ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
