Good news: the article has been updated based on input from Gabe and IBM-MAIN. See http://destinationz.org/Mainframe-Solution/Trends/elephants-and-mainframes for the revised version.
Thanks, all! Reg Harbeck +1.403.605.7986 -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On Behalf Of Reg Harbeck Sent: August 1, 2019 14:40 To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: IBM Destination z - Of Elephants and Mainframes Thank you, Gabe. I'm honoured that you read my writing so closely, and I take your correction seriously. I'll be more careful how I phrase such things in future articles. FWIW, I am aware that Fortran and other pre-COBOL languages already existed, so perhaps I should have said "much of this stuff" instead. (And to those who have made other suggestions on IBM-MAIN that I should have caught, but missed, in the past, my apologies: still getting into good habits of keeping up with this important part of the mainframe ecosystem.) Reg Harbeck +1.403.605.7986 P.S. Looking forward to seeing many of you in Pittsburgh next week. -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On Behalf Of Gabe Goldberg Sent: August 1, 2019 13:45 To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: IBM Destination z - Of Elephants and Mainframes Think back… think way back, possibly to before you were born. Think of the reasons why SHARE was founded in 1955, and the main activities of SHARE. Once upon a time, when electronic computing technology was still being figured out, each new machine was so different from its predecessors that it was necessary to rewrite a whole new set of utilities and drivers and applications for it. Even Assembly language wasn’t available until 1957 (and the first COBOL compiler didn’t come out until 1960) so most of this stuff had to be manually entered in machine language. http://destinationz.org/Mainframe-Solution/Trends/elephants-and-mainframes Um, no. ACM SIGPLAN History of Programming Languages Conference 1978 article on FORTRAN says: Page 166 1.3 Programming Systems in 1954 Most "automatic programming" systems were either assembly programs, or subroutine-fixing programs, or, most popularly, interpretive systems to provide floating point and indexing operations. --- That's far beyond machine language three years before article claims anything more advanced than that was used. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
