Am 27.04.2020 um 15:39 schrieb Clark Morris:
I wanted USAGE BIT 50 years ago because I was dealing with
bit switches on customer, product and open account files.
In 1992, my customer at that time (local transport) wanted to help
the local transport company in Lodz (Poland), which is our partner town,
to replace their ODRA machine (Polish ICL clone) by an IBM mainframe
(4381 model 12, IIRC) running VM/CMS, VSE, CICS, SQL/DS etc.
The programs there were COBOL programs. Our manager told the people there,
that there will be no problem, because COBOL is COBOL, after all.
When we looked at the COBOL programs at the ODRA machine, we soon
realized two severe problems that gave us some headaches:
- a printer with line width 160 characters (we had 132 maximum);
all ODRA programs of course used this line width for their reports
- and variable definitions like this:
01 BITS PIC 1(8).
that is: eight bits.
So the migration to IBM was not as cheap as expected :-)
what made our support more painful was the use of polish variable names
throughout the programs ... nobody of us knew Polish, only one of them knew
German, and one knew English :-(
but it was a very nice experience, great fun, and we stayed friends
until today
Kind regards
Bernd
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