I can hold my silence no longer.
FORTRAN in HS, Intro in college was FORTRAN, then 2 semesters of
ALC (S/360 DOS) and 1 of RPG|RPGII.
Taught myself COBOL well enough that in 2 weeks I could work on
it and do macro level CICS (CICS 1.1.1 -- LONG before CICS/TS for
you folk in CICS dev/support these days) and FASTER/MT or was it
MT/FASTER?
Eventually to the best job I ever had, working at AMDAHL in
MDF/Macrocode development, where my component was Machine Check
handling, and getting ready for ESA when they started laying off.
The things I learned about S/370...
I can still read manuals and learn stuff unlike most of the
current crop of kids. Which is what started this thread. But in
my case I just wanna SCREAM!! Because I ended up writing tech
manuals or parts of them for IBM and various ISVs over the years.
And in my last position, I wrote a utility to generate all the
JCL needed to do COBOL compiles, for CICS, DB2, PROCOBOL, IDMS...
And these kids couldn't be bothered to use PF1 (all field level
help, besides screen level help).
Typical call, The compiler is broken. Which compiler.... They
thought the tool was a compiler. And they didn't understand the
message(s) it put out. Or the JOB failed because their changes
were syntactically incorrect.
When we all are gone, I'm afraid that what one of the old SCI-FI
writers said in a story that I've now forgotten the title to,
that the society will collapse because no one knows how to fix
anything. Maybe some old COBOL programmer will be left in a
cryocrypt that they can get out and solve their medical problem,
for them to be able to explain how to fix.....
Steve Thompson
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
