I do not know about VISAM, but 360 FFS used variable length QISAM and BISAM in the late 60s and early 70s. The DOD used a lot of it. Been there and learned assembler to support applications using it.
Lloyd Sent from my iPad > On Mar 31, 2020, at 8:42 PM, Seymour J Metz <[email protected]> wrote: > > There was also a VISAM in TSS. > > > -- > Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz > http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 > > ________________________________________ > From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [[email protected]] on behalf of > Charles Mills [[email protected]] > Sent: Tuesday, March 31, 2020 4:46 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: PARM= vs PARMDD= and symbol substitution > > There were apparently several "VISAMs" around, because OCCURS DEPENDING is > such a basic feature of COBOL but RECFM=V was not supported by ISAM. > > I had a client (not FSA but interestingly also in the financial package > software business) that had its own homegrown (AFAIK) VISAM. It used short > fixed-length ISAM records with keys and a pointer to variable length BDAM > records. I remember it because I wrote some software that utilized it (but I > was not at all involved in its development). > > Charles > > > -----Original Message----- > From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On > Behalf Of Tony Thigpen > Sent: Monday, March 30, 2020 8:33 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: PARM= vs PARMDD= and symbol substitution > > Digging back into my mind for data from 1983: > > Third National of Nashville (TNB) ran a bank data processing site in > Florence, AL. The main bank there was First National (FNB). TNB decided > to close up shop in Florence so FNB took their data processing in-house. > FNB did not have a data processing department before this. > > I was one of three programmers hired by FNB for this new department. The > complete staff from the TNB site was hired by FNB with the permission of > TNB as the operational staff. > > We converted the data from TNB in-house written code to a set of > programs from an Orlando base software provider Financial Software of > America (FSA), later bought by UCC to become part of the new UCCEL > company, later acquired by CA and so forth. The one system FSA did not > have yet, but we needed, was a loan processing package. (They were > writing it, but it was not yet available.) > > TNB decided to give FNB the complete source for their Loan System. It > was in assembler and I was tasked to convert it from MVS (or what ever > at that time) to DOS/SIPO (predecessor to z/VSE). > > What I found was interesting. The system used something called VISAM, or > "variable length ISAM". It was not a big problem to convert it to VSAM, > but here is the story I got about VISAM. > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
