Am 24.02.2017 um 14:37 schrieb R.S.:
W dniu 2017-02-23 o 20:09, Bill Woodger pisze:
Also note that if you see a current job-ad for Fujitsu Mainframe
skills in the UK, it will be for an ICL Mainframe, running VME, and
being distinctly different from... anything from IBM. The COBOL is to
the 1974 Standard (with Extensions, including COMP-5 which allows the
definition of "bits").
Various parts of "the government" have huge projects at the moment
converting their old ICL systems to Microfocus COBOL on "servers".
It was very popular in Poland, because our government bought a license
for ICL machines and OS. Indeed, it wasn't even similar to IBM family.
The system name was GEORGE (GEORGE3), polish name of the machine was
ODRA (this is name of second largest polish river, which crosesse
Wrocław - a city where ODRA were built).
I think the last ODRA's were in use approx. 10 years ago in a railways.
Some years later there were also ODRA emulator working under VM on IBM
hardware. I met it approx 18-20 years ago. People claimed the emulator
was over 10 times faster than real machine. The emulator ran on 6 MIPS
4381.
There was a report generator on ODRA called TABU,
somehow similar to RPG, but more elegant IMO.
I wrote a Pascal program for MPK Lodz (in 1991) to convert their
TABU reports to COBOL programs, because they replaced their
ODRA machine with a 4381 VM machine; but because they
had so much TABU reports, there had to be a solution for this.
I also heard that the ODRA simulator was very successful;
MPK also sold computer time on ODRA to third parties, and
they charged for ODRA time, but in fact they ran the batch programs
on the VM based ODRA simulator, so they got more money in less time.
There were also stories that they managed to build an interface for
a very large old Russian tape device and attach it to the 4381 somehow.
BTW: the Odra river marks the frontier to Germany, too,
the German name is "Oder".
Kind regards
Bernd
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