Randy Hudson wrote: <begin extract> I don't believe MVCIN was available on the 360/50; we used the TR instruction to reverse fields, or otherwise re-arrange them. <end extract>
and he at once quite correct and utterly wrong. As usual, it depends upon what "was available" is thought to mean. There is and has "always" been a list of non-standard mainframe instructions that IBM can make available for a [small] fee. Some shops use one or more of them, and others are unaware of them. MVCIN is an instruction that shops that do text processing in a semitic language (or in Farsi, which, while Indo-european, is also written from right to left in an almost but not quite standard version of the Arabic alphabet) had an early felt need for. IBM met that need, and MVCIN was available early in the Middle East, certainly by 1971 when I first encountered it there. It was, for example, installed on the mainframes of the National Iranian Oil Company (Naft Melli) in Tehran and Abadan in the early 1970s; and I remember writing and installing a BIF that made it available in PL/I there. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
