Many years ago I was hired by a large bank as a business analyst. I'd worked in a branch of the bank, but I knew nothing about computers. My boss figured I needed to know some basic computer concepts to deal with programmers, so he gave me a COBOL manual to read. When I got to chapter 3, it gave an example of a very small program that displayed something on the console and accepted something from the console. I thought it looked simple enough so I'd give it a try.
I typed in the program and modified it slightly to display "What is the second largest city in England?", accept the answer, and display "If you said Birmingham, well done". I wasn't sure how to run it, so I went to the command line and typed RUN, EXECUTE, GO (etc.), and of course none of them worked. I asked a co-worker for help, and he said I needed to compile my program. "Huh?" I said, so he showed me how to do it. "Can I run it now?", "No", he said "You need to link it". So then he showed me how to do that. By now I was getting a bit frustrated with the complexity of running such a small and simple program. "Can I run it now?" I asked, and he said "No, you need to create some JCL to run it". So then he helped me set that up. Finally, I submitted the JCL and sat back in anticipation of seeing the question pop up on my screen. Instead of seeing the question what I saw instead was a "job completed" message. I was completely confused. How could the job complete if I hadn't seen the question and hadn't had a chance to respond to it? I turned back to my co-worker and asked him for help. He very patiently explained how to check the output from my job, and took me to where I needed to go to see it. I started scrolling through what seemed like a lot of output for such a very small program, and finally I saw my question "What is the second largest city in England?". Directly beneath that it said "Manchester". My mind started to whirl, and I couldn't understand what was happening. I hadn't typed in "Manchester", so where on Earth did that come from? Had the mainframe attempted to answer my question? And if so, how could such a big and powerful computer manage to get the answer wrong? I turned to my co-worker again and told him I didn't understand what was happening. He asked to see my program, and I showed it to him. He started laughing, and called everyone over to see what the new guy had done. I sat there while everyone laughed, and finally my co-worked explained that "display upon console" meant one of the busy operators in the computer operations center of the major bank where we all worked had saw my question flash up on his console screen and had tried to answer it! I cringed while everyone laughed, and figured my probation period had probably just come to an untimely end. I waited for my phone to ring or for someone to come and escort me out of the building. Fortunately that didn't happen. But I often wonder who answered my question, and what went through their mind when they saw it pop up on their screen? Dave Salt SimpList(tm) - try it; you'll get it! http://www.mackinney.com/products/program-development/simplist.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
