At Purdue University, in 1965, the Share Programming Library (might not be quite right name) card decks filled cabinets that were 6 feet tall and about 40 feet of wall space. These were the contributed programs and subroutines available to all SHARE members. I can't recall if they were automatically send or had to be requested, but I think all possible card decks were in those cabinets.
Barry Herbert W. "Barry" Merrill, PhD President-Programmer MXG Software Merrill Consultants 10717 Cromwell Drive Dallas, TX 75229-5112 [email protected] Fax: 214 350 3694 - Still works, received as email Tel: 214 351 1966 - Unreliable, please use email www.mxg.com HomePage: FAQ answers most questions [email protected] License Forms, Invoice, Payment, ftp information [email protected] Technical Issues MXG-L FREE ListServer http://www.mxg.com/mxg-l_listserver/ -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Joel C. Ewing Sent: Thursday, December 03, 2015 10:44 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?] 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] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
