On 12/02/2015 11:09 PM, Ed Gould wrote:
> On Dec 2, 2015, at 2:58 PM, Joel C. Ewing wrote:
>
>> I just weighed the one almost-full box of some old programs and data
>> cards that I have retained for show-and-tell over the years, and it is a
>> little over 8 lbs. Since the cards have holes punched, have some
>> lighter cardboard spacers, and new cards pack more tightly, I would
>> estimate 10 lbs as a better approximation for a box of 2000 unused
>> cards.
>>
>> Before we started conversion from DOS/VSE to MVS in 1985, all our
>> production JCL was on cards in several card filing cabinets. My
>> recollection is that a cabinet drawer could hold around two boxes of
>> cards, so the maximum capacity of one cabinet might have been on the
>> order of 40 boxes of cards. We could easily have had somewhere in the
>> neighborhood of 0.5 - 1.0 tons of cards containing JCL. A larger shop
>> might literally have had several tons of JCL.
>> Joel C. Ewing
>
>
> Joel:
> Interesting. I have never worked in a shop (last say 45 years) where
> there was that much punched cards. There were some cases where the
> programmer submitted boxes of cards for one time update to a source
> lib and maybe 5 or so JCL cards. Production was similar one or two job
> cards a joblib and exec and then probably either a /* or // card.
>
> None of the shops I have ever worked in used that much JCL PERIOD.
>
> This does not include a very few jobs that had "data" cards mind you.
> Those types of jobs were rare and were handled as a card to tape on
> the dos side and used a tape on the MFT/MVT side.
>
> Ed
>
>
When I came on-board in 1978, all program development and maintenance
and test job submission, except for one or two Luddite-programmer
holdouts who still edited source decks, was done from IBM 3277's using
a home-grown On-Line Editor (OLE') system running under a home-grown
multi-tasking ("Mini-Task") interactive environment, which supported
multiple interactive on-line applications in a single DOS/VS job
partition. Because DOS/VS had native support for source and object
libraries, those were kept online, but there was no decent native
support to effectively submit production job JCL from libraries and the
company was averse to spending on "unneeded" additional software, so
production JCL was created in OLE' but punched and kept on cards for use
by Operations.
At one time the company had been a service bureau. That was no longer
the case when I arrived -- by then it was just the DP subsidiary of
Arkansas Best Corp -- but they continued to support and do processing
for former service-bureau customers who chose to stay. That meant, for
example, that there might be many different payroll, accounts payable,
accounts receivable, etc. JCL job decks executing essentially the same
programs but with different parameters and files. So our ratio of JCL
images to program source images might have been higher than typical.
When we started DOS/VSE to MVS/XA migration in 1985, we were already
running the maximum of four, shared-SPOOL DOS/VSE systems under VM and
all on-line applications had by then been converted to run under CICS.
We converted to VM/XA (I think still called "VM Migration Aid" at the
time) to also support MVS/XA. As primary technical support for MVS, the
very first "production" application I created under MVS was to set up a
TSO/ISPF application to allow operators to submit DOS production JCL
from an efficiently-blocked MVS PDS library under MVS using an MVS VM
virtual card punch feeding a DOS VM virtual card reader. Not only did
that finally eliminate all the cabinets with JCL card decks, but it made
all production JCL easily accessible for analysis and conversion during
the subsequent migration process.
Without further empirical data points to establish the typical effect on
weight of the average holes per card I guess a more precise conversion
factor isn't possible, but it appears the likely bounds at this point are
1 ton JCL cards ~= 400,000 to 666,666 80-byte JCL images.
--
Joel C. Ewing, Bentonville, AR [email protected]
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