subject:"\"Everyone wants to retire mainframes\""

Some of the entertaining horror stories were not funny at the time. Take the 
JES2 and TSO Command Package packaging errors, thinly disguised at 
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3/humor/PUT.Process.html; I was definitely not 
amused at the time.

My favorite was "But COBOL doesn't use registers."


--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3


From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of Bob 
Bridges [robhbrid...@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, June 12, 2020 5:36 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

Volvo Truck NA, for whom I worked 14 years, had a sort of DOS-101 class for
all our end users who were trying to figure out how to use the PCs newly on
their desks.  Some of them actually seemed to pay attention, and came back
to their cubicles understanding, for instance, what a root directory is and
why it isn't a good idea to have all their documents there.  So they'd start
looking through their hard drive's root directory and deleting old stuff.
Harvard-Graphics documents: move them or delete them.  Old WordPerfect
documents: if they're old enough, dump 'em.  Here are a couple of utilities
they never got around to using:  Delete them.  COMMAND.COM ... wait,
"COMMAND.COM"?  What's that?  Another utility I never use; out it goes.

This is not the end of the world.  Any copy of COMMAND.COM will work;
there's no need to carefully match the correct version with the OS on the
victim's machine.  But one day a coworker was leaving our location, on his
way to the 3rd floor to replace someone's COMMAND.COM and loudly wondering
why the #!$@ users couldn't leave their %#@* files the @#*&! alone.  I
expostulated:  "Randy, relax.  This is an easy fix.  And these guys who're
doing this, they're the guys that'll learn eventually, and be..." well, one
of the users Mr Metz admonishes us (correctly) to cherish.  "In six months
you'll be able to talk to this guy on the phone, instead of looking over his
shoulder, and say "I dunno, maybe it's in the Windows directory; go look
there", instead of saying "Ok, type this: cee dee colon backslash ess wye
[and so on]...have you hit  yet?  Hit ...".  I like the
knowledgeable ones better.  The others give us the entertaining horror
stories, but I don't mind investing time in training the ones who want to
learn.  That's actually one of the things I found most rewarding about
end-user support.  What ended up driving me out were the users who
steadfastly declined to have their problems explained.

(If you're playing on-line games and run across a character named "Teacher",
there's a good chance it's me.)

---
Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313

/* I think everyone who chooses to stay out of politics (which is your
right) should make a mental note of where they would draw the line and feel
it necessary to get involved. Then ask yourself:  Is it possible that point
already arrived, but it happened too slowly to notice?  -Chris Evans */


-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
Behalf Of Seymour J Metz
Sent: Friday, June 12, 2020 12:39

On the flip side, there are some users who know what they are doing and give
you the data that you need to resolve the problem. Cherish them.

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Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

2020-06-12 Thread Bob Bridges

Volvo Truck NA, for whom I worked 14 years, had a sort of DOS-101 class for
all our end users who were trying to figure out how to use the PCs newly on
their desks.  Some of them actually seemed to pay attention, and came back
to their cubicles understanding, for instance, what a root directory is and
why it isn't a good idea to have all their documents there.  So they'd start
looking through their hard drive's root directory and deleting old stuff.
Harvard-Graphics documents: move them or delete them.  Old WordPerfect
documents: if they're old enough, dump 'em.  Here are a couple of utilities
they never got around to using:  Delete them.  COMMAND.COM ... wait,
"COMMAND.COM"?  What's that?  Another utility I never use; out it goes.

This is not the end of the world.  Any copy of COMMAND.COM will work;
there's no need to carefully match the correct version with the OS on the
victim's machine.  But one day a coworker was leaving our location, on his
way to the 3rd floor to replace someone's COMMAND.COM and loudly wondering
why the #!$@ users couldn't leave their %#@* files the @#*&! alone.  I
expostulated:  "Randy, relax.  This is an easy fix.  And these guys who're
doing this, they're the guys that'll learn eventually, and be..." well, one
of the users Mr Metz admonishes us (correctly) to cherish.  "In six months
you'll be able to talk to this guy on the phone, instead of looking over his
shoulder, and say "I dunno, maybe it's in the Windows directory; go look
there", instead of saying "Ok, type this: cee dee colon backslash ess wye
[and so on]...have you hit  yet?  Hit ...".  I like the
knowledgeable ones better.  The others give us the entertaining horror
stories, but I don't mind investing time in training the ones who want to
learn.  That's actually one of the things I found most rewarding about
end-user support.  What ended up driving me out were the users who
steadfastly declined to have their problems explained.

(If you're playing on-line games and run across a character named "Teacher",
there's a good chance it's me.)

---
Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313

/* I think everyone who chooses to stay out of politics (which is your
right) should make a mental note of where they would draw the line and feel
it necessary to get involved. Then ask yourself:  Is it possible that point
already arrived, but it happened too slowly to notice?  -Chris Evans */


-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
Behalf Of Seymour J Metz
Sent: Friday, June 12, 2020 12:39

On the flip side, there are some users who know what they are doing and give
you the data that you need to resolve the problem. Cherish them.

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Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

2020-06-12 Thread Don Leahy

Many years ago when my organization was developing thousands of online
screens for our IMS applications, I tried to get our screen design
standards committee to implement a standard that would have required a
message id to appear beside every error message displayed on the screen.
They flatly refused to consider the idea.

On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 12:39 Seymour J Metz  wrote:

> I was once involved with a lady who had been director of user support, and
> thought that she deserved a medal for putting up with it.
>
> On the flip side, there are some users who know what they are doing and
> give you the data that you need to resolve the problem. Cherish them.
>
>
> --
> Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
> http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3
>
> 
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf
> of R.S. [r.skoru...@bremultibank.com.pl]
> Sent: Friday, June 12, 2020 7:23 AM
> To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
> Subject: Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire
> mainframes")
>
> W dniu 12.06.2020 o 12:59, Seymour J Metz pisze:
> > Well, if they come from a world where there is no messages manual, it
> may not occur to them to RTFM; that should be part of their initial
> training, but we all know how generous education budgets are these days.
>
> I teach mainframe courses in Poland, including "Mainframe and z/OS
> Introduction". One of the topics I present is documentation, messages,
> and WAY OF WORK. I really need to explain it is good idea to read
> sysout, analyze messages, check them in documentation.
> People are trying to use google, of course not for "IEC030I", but rather
> for "my job fails - IEBGENER is broken". And they are looking for some
> forum where other newbies answer incorrectly to bad questions. ;-)
> As a "bonus" topic on JCL course we have problem investigation - I have
> several cases with typical errors and the task is to find the
> explanation in the documentation. OK, find and *understand*.
>
>
> --
> Radoslaw Skorupka
> Lodz, Poland
>
>
>
>
>
> ==
>
> Jeśli nie jesteś adresatem tej wiadomości:
>
> - powiadom nas o tym w mailu zwrotnym (dziękujemy!),
> - usuń trwale tę wiadomość (i wszystkie kopie, które wydrukowałeś lub
> zapisałeś na dysku).
> Wiadomość ta może zawierać chronione prawem informacje, które może
> wykorzystać tylko adresat.Przypominamy, że każdy, kto rozpowszechnia
> (kopiuje, rozprowadza) tę wiadomość lub podejmuje podobne działania,
> narusza prawo i może podlegać karze.
>
> mBank S.A. z siedzibą w Warszawie, ul. Senatorska 18,
> <https://www.google.com/maps/search/,+ul.+Senatorska+18,+?entry=gmail=g>00-950
> Warszawa,
> http://secure-web.cisco.com/1L9zMAWn44gXBosl23ryFmmZRlPD7Hv5DJW4XkIYhu4U-bJHTAkbq1IflALO_5lB90MpKRZRiY4EGohWX0pPn7Ei9qIFrpdjqjOHwNHJJefm6AcRkT6_TG3Z7stIm88b_S0PQijMnusrQbWUGpgHAQHK92hFNITpR9VlVTVAwouUfUdQxKHpURC4AVi25z5Sq-3RPqdUjXbZeqf8XHmPLt4sh0V_E2lD4TFsSLvTcrkhXq7P8gaN26Cf8aJTiXV5IfftDORgfSvc6rCJpQPvyaaJIvdD_smHOa3pYMecsPFoRe6hXZoG4N1gHjE-YAAapcKnIDOIXEmxOj_4gEjs8aAlta0olJCQq4tkyDqQEBzRbLhgjbdlTNNSmw9T7TUhJmFgH5PndgF2R-AK-oYsj2JFbpiPliOO_WaCcvmWNJhrM_gtwRCQZv0pp3E4TgvP5/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mBank.pl,
> e-mail: kont...@mbank.pl. Sąd Rejonowy dla m. st. Warszawy XII Wydział
> Gospodarczy Krajowego Rejestru Sądowego, KRS 025237, NIP:
> 526-021-50-88. Kapitał zakładowy (opłacony w całości) według stanu na
> 01.01.2020 r. wynosi 169.401.468 złotych.
>
> If you are not the addressee of this message:
>
> - let us know by replying to this e-mail (thank you!),
> - delete this message permanently (including all the copies which you have
> printed out or saved).
> This message may contain legally protected information, which may be used
> exclusively by the addressee.Please be reminded that anyone who
> disseminates (copies, distributes) this message or takes any similar
> action, violates the law and may be penalised.
>
> mBank S.A. with its registered office in Warsaw, ul. Senatorska 18,
> <https://www.google.com/maps/search/,+ul.+Senatorska+18,+?entry=gmail=g>00-950
> Warszawa,
> http://secure-web.cisco.com/1L9zMAWn44gXBosl23ryFmmZRlPD7Hv5DJW4XkIYhu4U-bJHTAkbq1IflALO_5lB90MpKRZRiY4EGohWX0pPn7Ei9qIFrpdjqjOHwNHJJefm6AcRkT6_TG3Z7stIm88b_S0PQijMnusrQbWUGpgHAQHK92hFNITpR9VlVTVAwouUfUdQxKHpURC4AVi25z5Sq-3RPqdUjXbZeqf8XHmPLt4sh0V_E2lD4TFsSLvTcrkhXq7P8gaN26Cf8aJTiXV5IfftDORgfSvc6rCJpQPvyaaJIvdD_smHOa3pYMecsPFoRe6hXZoG4N1gHjE-YAAapcKnIDOIXEmxOj_4gEjs8aAlta0olJCQq4tkyDqQEBzRbLhgjbdlTNNSmw9T7TUhJmFgH5PndgF2R-AK-oYsj2JFbpiPliOO_WaCcvmWNJhrM_gtwRCQZv0pp3E4TgvP5/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mBank.pl,
> e-mail: kont...@mbank.pl. District Court for the Ca

Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

I was once involved with a lady who had been director of user support, and 
thought that she deserved a medal for putting up with it.

On the flip side, there are some users who know what they are doing and give 
you the data that you need to resolve the problem. Cherish them.


--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3


From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of 
R.S. [r.skoru...@bremultibank.com.pl]
Sent: Friday, June 12, 2020 7:23 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

W dniu 12.06.2020 o 12:59, Seymour J Metz pisze:
> Well, if they come from a world where there is no messages manual, it may not 
> occur to them to RTFM; that should be part of their initial training, but we 
> all know how generous education budgets are these days.

I teach mainframe courses in Poland, including "Mainframe and z/OS
Introduction". One of the topics I present is documentation, messages,
and WAY OF WORK. I really need to explain it is good idea to read
sysout, analyze messages, check them in documentation.
People are trying to use google, of course not for "IEC030I", but rather
for "my job fails - IEBGENER is broken". And they are looking for some
forum where other newbies answer incorrectly to bad questions. ;-)
As a "bonus" topic on JCL course we have problem investigation - I have
several cases with typical errors and the task is to find the
explanation in the documentation. OK, find and *understand*.


--
Radoslaw Skorupka
Lodz, Poland





==

Jeśli nie jesteś adresatem tej wiadomości:

- powiadom nas o tym w mailu zwrotnym (dziękujemy!),
- usuń trwale tę wiadomość (i wszystkie kopie, które wydrukowałeś lub zapisałeś 
na dysku).
Wiadomość ta może zawierać chronione prawem informacje, które może wykorzystać 
tylko adresat.Przypominamy, że każdy, kto rozpowszechnia (kopiuje, rozprowadza) 
tę wiadomość lub podejmuje podobne działania, narusza prawo i może podlegać 
karze.

mBank S.A. z siedzibą w Warszawie, ul. Senatorska 18, 00-950 
Warszawa,http://secure-web.cisco.com/1L9zMAWn44gXBosl23ryFmmZRlPD7Hv5DJW4XkIYhu4U-bJHTAkbq1IflALO_5lB90MpKRZRiY4EGohWX0pPn7Ei9qIFrpdjqjOHwNHJJefm6AcRkT6_TG3Z7stIm88b_S0PQijMnusrQbWUGpgHAQHK92hFNITpR9VlVTVAwouUfUdQxKHpURC4AVi25z5Sq-3RPqdUjXbZeqf8XHmPLt4sh0V_E2lD4TFsSLvTcrkhXq7P8gaN26Cf8aJTiXV5IfftDORgfSvc6rCJpQPvyaaJIvdD_smHOa3pYMecsPFoRe6hXZoG4N1gHjE-YAAapcKnIDOIXEmxOj_4gEjs8aAlta0olJCQq4tkyDqQEBzRbLhgjbdlTNNSmw9T7TUhJmFgH5PndgF2R-AK-oYsj2JFbpiPliOO_WaCcvmWNJhrM_gtwRCQZv0pp3E4TgvP5/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mBank.pl,
 e-mail: kont...@mbank.pl. Sąd Rejonowy dla m. st. Warszawy XII Wydział 
Gospodarczy Krajowego Rejestru Sądowego, KRS 025237, NIP: 526-021-50-88. 
Kapitał zakładowy (opłacony w całości) według stanu na 01.01.2020 r. wynosi 
169.401.468 złotych.

If you are not the addressee of this message:

- let us know by replying to this e-mail (thank you!),
- delete this message permanently (including all the copies which you have 
printed out or saved).
This message may contain legally protected information, which may be used 
exclusively by the addressee.Please be reminded that anyone who disseminates 
(copies, distributes) this message or takes any similar action, violates the 
law and may be penalised.

mBank S.A. with its registered office in Warsaw, ul. Senatorska 18, 00-950 
Warszawa,http://secure-web.cisco.com/1L9zMAWn44gXBosl23ryFmmZRlPD7Hv5DJW4XkIYhu4U-bJHTAkbq1IflALO_5lB90MpKRZRiY4EGohWX0pPn7Ei9qIFrpdjqjOHwNHJJefm6AcRkT6_TG3Z7stIm88b_S0PQijMnusrQbWUGpgHAQHK92hFNITpR9VlVTVAwouUfUdQxKHpURC4AVi25z5Sq-3RPqdUjXbZeqf8XHmPLt4sh0V_E2lD4TFsSLvTcrkhXq7P8gaN26Cf8aJTiXV5IfftDORgfSvc6rCJpQPvyaaJIvdD_smHOa3pYMecsPFoRe6hXZoG4N1gHjE-YAAapcKnIDOIXEmxOj_4gEjs8aAlta0olJCQq4tkyDqQEBzRbLhgjbdlTNNSmw9T7TUhJmFgH5PndgF2R-AK-oYsj2JFbpiPliOO_WaCcvmWNJhrM_gtwRCQZv0pp3E4TgvP5/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mBank.pl,
 e-mail: kont...@mbank.pl. District Court for the Capital City of Warsaw, 12th 
Commercial Division of the National Court Register, KRS 025237, NIP: 
526-021-50-88. Fully paid-up share capital amounting to PLN 169.401.468 as at 1 
January 2020.

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Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

Did he get his start as a Tech Writer for COBOL (E)?


--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3


From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of 
Herring, Bobby [bherr...@txfb-ins.com]
Sent: Friday, June 12, 2020 9:23 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

We used to run a product called SPIFFY by Isogon. It was bought by IBM and 
renamed to Dataset Commander. I was actually told by the IBMer supporting the 
product that they didn't have a messages manual. He said the messages were 
self-explanatory. And he was serious.

I tried to explain that if they were truly that self-explanatory, then I 
wouldn't be opening incidents with them for problems.

Bobby Herring
Texas Farm Bureau Insurance

From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List  On Behalf Of 
Seymour J Metz
Sent: Friday, June 12, 2020 6:02 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: [IBM-MAIN] Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire 
mainframes")

CAUTION: This email message originated from outside the organization. Do not 
click on links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the 
content is safe.

> 4. Message description in the book is more than "Something is wrong.
Try again later".

That may be true now: I still recall with rage "The following messages are self 
explanatory."


--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz


[http://secure-web.cisco.com/18w9NIprfVfmEn1Oozof2EaxrwO8nCMxU5L4MVMCykMtC3xrvmdoNiU7VgJo427-qwV5vbA-IFNJp3LhFL2g7XSMNh5aafnrW4h8v01GFSy7uJWGotGrutdSqf2euDU_tKe1vsxXgUe9D8a13hl43qk8q4wQGA7lTHKqsCzchq3zFn796S3NL2P_9G0779dYZqO-q3Yze9kJcrg7yFEsN0LoNBbZuFVjqCzUib6Ryf0S_j4CjAKEmEaMeGeVrCdFHsSn7EWnTB3jFKmAaTt1C5mzeMAwfMw3p9d7YVNlepCUKkZ_95DV45l4R9Z8vzMXw0mMRpue3ZC-Eb3d2XIEEec8kCX1rneRFZMcZjL7fS7vNg3BwnNsIAfNy_zJeB6tcigth_mVRkTdGxJHCaGM62wmOTcNbXKTvAYs21KANNyp1ID1uMAdrurEdz_EdYSs8/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.txfb-ins.com%2FTFBICImages%2Fjdpower.jpg]
http://secure-web.cisco.com/1KA__pf3Y-lIixjWfMiART9oVESn-lxiareUORQgTpCOUMx4QT2P8qnGkSO7BjthCbZf9I_RWzOu3jrpsKqXyP5IJG0W5wIpuIFU8tvYk7Scjvn7EX82D2xJN1EZneVT_8AXldmBmglq8fXNgrr81WjYZHo0QTQnrPOu0vCTszT8sbuhFcFBzfrwK4X2G2Kh1lvcr9IaIrU4Wn2ynNfT7YLArzuFDVGJlyBkXqSMKcQOY4Dxa6By4xuzC3cgWXxkEFXOJyrBHbItAq-Og3Cr0twuwjnaLiaCzmtilaKuDSOFMwrb0Oy2NQHzRKsu4zigyjl4PHMNWsI7I4n2f-0zGxdFbj3twFCXfrRgEb3Reaqj-vdo-O6Rh7T9v4a6OUBi9hricZs9sH4VxeKNDGz9M82tSYsfwfBMOwWHrtTezK8_iz5tLtdygn2t03cNhBGjr/http%3A%2F%2FWWW.TXFB-INS.COM<http://secure-web.cisco.com/1u28hkWB0EEP3RCmoijv-CETqeYnXWHcauEZvwQdp5PdZbi3PcLuktQnYQxxgNfh2hiQq0FfuZ_DVCrm9UY-uQdbJrD3Prh1CWWRVja9OJRmj1bLvXf3u9BXcGpjhV345uWkdjcTWiWz9rGkbZKUb6Hw_gODBWbFJWUv2koIhOcIDsFnKBwnh3G5Fu4ok6FniYZG7uf4Rt2icVc62LMPaRnfrT9QIWOIIac25wHgk3K6BiY2yMJF_Uw94acY6Zpk-WYOh_tEr1reE2oXMYTxLJQEhp0ybQvMwiLXKXkOrPKz1eECSClEl-nglqwJDhFuXE9AgcMxpMt2uVlrOaop8MjDmv3w_26EGEyQ3ZDk6oh2EEB4j-HVUFKsNc0psdAyuaIKlkFM6F-o3BKl_THwqUXGCk8RsYY1XBbA55hjwwNCkBYdf-uWumgTf7MRkKFzw/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.txfb-ins.com>

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-12 Thread Phil Smith III

Tom Brennan wrote:
>At least in that case you can hopefully reproduce the error :)
>It's the one-time lost error messages that as a support person, you 
>sometimes have to say, "Oh well"

I call this an "anecdotal error": worth opening a ticket with as much (little) 
detail as possible and then closing immediately, so it's recorded. Get a few of 
these with the same symptom and eventually you get enough breadcrumbs to 
connect the dots. I remember a problem I tracked this way for three years, 
finally nailed it.

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Re: [External] Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-12 Thread Phil Smith III

Charles Mills wrote, in part:
>I never bothered -- I have always gone with (s) as in "You have %d dog(s)"

You could substitute "an integer value greater 0 and less than 2" when it's 
"1", and then "dogs" would always be correct :)

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Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

2020-06-12 Thread Charles Mills

It's not the users -- they want the original (i.e., in this case, English)
documentation. It is fussbudgets in purchasing or legal.

Charles


-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
Behalf Of R.S.
Sent: Friday, June 12, 2020 4:34 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire
mainframes")

Well...
The only country I can imagine such approach is France.
I don't know Japan, so I cannot say.
However I met mainrame people from South America and they told me they 
orderd and use English documentation due to quality (Spanish doco is 
horrible - they said).
I have never heard about such problems from Swedish, German or Italian 
folks.
Even guys in UK use IBM documentation and understand it! Almost without 
complaints. 

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Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

2020-06-12 Thread Herring, Bobby

We used to run a product called SPIFFY by Isogon. It was bought by IBM and 
renamed to Dataset Commander. I was actually told by the IBMer supporting the 
product that they didn't have a messages manual. He said the messages were 
self-explanatory. And he was serious.

I tried to explain that if they were truly that self-explanatory, then I 
wouldn't be opening incidents with them for problems.

Bobby Herring
Texas Farm Bureau Insurance

From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List  On Behalf Of 
Seymour J Metz
Sent: Friday, June 12, 2020 6:02 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: [IBM-MAIN] Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire 
mainframes")

CAUTION: This email message originated from outside the organization. Do not 
click on links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the 
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> 4. Message description in the book is more than "Something is wrong.
Try again later".

That may be true now: I still recall with rage "The following messages are self 
explanatory."


--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz


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Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

2020-06-12 Thread R.S.


Well...
The only country I can imagine such approach is France.
I don't know Japan, so I cannot say.
However I met mainrame people from South America and they told me they 
orderd and use English documentation due to quality (Spanish doco is 
horrible - they said).
I have never heard about such problems from Swedish, German or Italian 
folks.
Even guys in UK use IBM documentation and understand it! Almost without 
complaints. 



(no offence intended)

--
Radoslaw Skorupka
Lodz, Poland







W dniu 11.06.2020 o 16:12, Charles Mills pisze:

You have to understand national politics: "we won't buy this product; the
error messages are in English" [not French, Japanese, etc.]

Even though you are of course right, "diskette in drive" is more
understandable to the average French speaker than !! Sys01475

Charles

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
Behalf Of Timothy Sipples
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2020 1:42 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire
mainframes")

This pair of error messages was a design mistake:

OS/2 !! Sys01475
OS/2 !! Sys02027

That's a case of national language considerations run amok. That was the
only pair of messages you saw on your screen when you formatted a diskette
with OS/2, left the diskette in the primary drive, and rebooted the
typical PC of that era (that didn't automatically try to boot from another
device when there was a diskette in the primary drive).

A diskette's boot sector doesn't have much room, so the designers had to
be concise. They wanted to include at least one error code, and they did.
But then instead of some portion of the planet not understanding what
happened, very nearly the entire planet didn't understand what happened.
:-)

A better design would have used a global message like this:

OS/2 SYS01475: Diskette in Drive!

That's exactly the same number of characters, assuming the new line was
one character. (If not, the colon could have been omitted.) Yes, "Diskette
in Drive!" is technically English, but even so it would have been much
more broadly, globally understood than mystery error codes.





==

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Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

2020-06-12 Thread R.S.


W dniu 12.06.2020 o 12:59, Seymour J Metz pisze:

Well, if they come from a world where there is no messages manual, it may not 
occur to them to RTFM; that should be part of their initial training, but we 
all know how generous education budgets are these days.


I teach mainframe courses in Poland, including "Mainframe and z/OS 
Introduction". One of the topics I present is documentation, messages, 
and WAY OF WORK. I really need to explain it is good idea to read 
sysout, analyze messages, check them in documentation.
People are trying to use google, of course not for "IEC030I", but rather 
for "my job fails - IEBGENER is broken". And they are looking for some 
forum where other newbies answer incorrectly to bad questions. ;-)
As a "bonus" topic on JCL course we have problem investigation - I have 
several cases with typical errors and the task is to find the 
explanation in the documentation. OK, find and *understand*.



--
Radoslaw Skorupka
Lodz, Poland





==

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mBank S.A. z siedzibą w Warszawie, ul. Senatorska 18, 00-950 
Warszawa,www.mBank.pl, e-mail: kont...@mbank.pl. Sąd Rejonowy dla m. st. 
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Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

> 4. Message description in the book is more than "Something is wrong. 
Try again later".

That may be true now: I still recall with rage "The following messages are self 
explanatory."

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3

From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of 
R.S. [r.skoru...@bremultibank.com.pl]
Sent: Friday, June 12, 2020 4:51 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

Well, I wrote an article on my internal company blog, recently. It was
exactly about messages and codes.
People couldn't believe in some statements:
1. Every message has its own ID. Fortunately readers agreed that msg ID
is far better than "Oops! Something went wrong, try again later".
2. Every message is documented, and there is "Messages and Codes"
bookshelf. And there are books and even bookshelves. And it was
available from Internet for 20+ years.
3. Every message ID has prefix which clearly describes that it comes
from CICS, DB2, RACF... (DFH, DSN, ICH...)
4. Message description in the book is more than "Something is wrong. Try
again later".
5. Return code has meaning. It is more than "zero vs non-zero" RC.

I wish I could put here some pictures with funny/annoying Windows
messages here.  ;-)

--
Radoslaw Skorupka
Lodz, Poland

W dniu 10.06.2020 o 22:02, Steve Smith pisze:
> I take this example as merely an example.  IBM & the software industry are
> notoriously bad at getting these right.
>
> At one end, you have "Oops, something went wrong."  -- Windows 10 (and
> yeah, the day I started using Windows 10).
>
> At the other, IDC3009I.  Sheesh.
>
> Counter to those, the IMS message doesn't seem quite so bad... it's
> (presumably) accurate, and fairly precise.  You could argue it could be
> worded more simply, or that it should provide the detailed codes.
>
> In my experience, messages get very little attention or quality review.
> I'm sure it varies a lot.
>
> sas
>
> On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 3:50 PM Paul Gilmartin <
> 000433f07816-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 10 Jun 2020 17:02:40 +, Frank Swarbrick wrote:
>>
>>> Here's a quote from a message I posted to this list in 2009:
>>>
>>> "I have a very basic one to complain about:
>>>
>>> DFS0929I BLDL FAILED FOR MEMBER --DDMPPSZ
>>>
>>> This really means that the specified PSB DDMPPSZ is not in the specified
>> IMS library.  Why can't it just say that?  As an application programmer do
>> I really need to know that BLDL means, well, whatever it means?
>> The practice was established over a half century ago when every programmer
>> could be presumed to have at least a superficial knowledge of the entire
>> OS/360
>> reference library.  And storage was too precious to support elaborate
>> messages.
>>
>> That time has passed.
>>
>> The practice persists.
>>
>> -- gil
>>

==

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tę wiadomość lub podejmuje podobne działania, narusza prawo i może podlegać 
karze.

mBank S.A. z siedzibą w Warszawie, ul. Senatorska 18, 00-950 
Warszawa,http://secure-web.cisco.com/1-o52lOIUVmrpRRB2evtM2aDfHTi7CkCC-0kWD68a2sG-eAou-XjkB2OaML2ka-5IWhf6Uiw7xuyYJYkoauV66tw5jUbF1xklR-4oLO5TvL353wvpksA8Ac4haRBI7lfv0zAEP-lrWPaEGBPIh8asL80fU2FU6nS8K79i9Q3cqqfR7jZdDVOXVS8b1nGysK8tHieZxjRJl1MDdOtKWLwwc2VFazJeaRrwqhbA5yLMxmGjdk_DqqyrFzUxBh47xltb-wWNmCOvYlQd7aaqWsSyrUM-MYGC9d8yjtmYj3ezEV5Hmlipf9PlkPrEpZh1OrHogHE-x3K42ZdMEP2XYXc9gra4nh9vumLJvQj_sKxuzoeTF54PHIpdRCDYopgkrsuM3OJiQi9CAqTur63dIUDTPB5wBUCVdwStEmZ8x8dqScJWINdXhHH5ylGtk-KBVELG/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mBank.pl,
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Kapitał zakładowy (opłacony w całości) według stanu na 01.01.2020 r. wynosi 
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Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

Well, if they come from a world where there is no messages manual, it may not 
occur to them to RTFM; that should be part of their initial training, but we 
all know how generous education budgets are these days.


--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3


From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of 
Martin Packer [martin_pac...@uk.ibm.com]
Sent: Friday, June 12, 2020 5:23 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

I wonder, though, whether newbies can easily tell the difference between
eg "DFS" and "DFH". Particularly poignant, that pair. :-)

So we all know "ICH" and, latterly "IRR", (FSVO "latterly" :-) ) are RACF.
But do newbies pick this up quickly?

Cheers, Martin

Martin Packer

zChampion, Systems Investigator & Performance Troubleshooter, IBM

+44-7802-245-584

email: martin_pac...@uk.ibm.com

Twitter / Facebook IDs: MartinPacker

Blog: 
https://secure-web.cisco.com/18ahigRwLqngX6Mic0Nh_MNiy4lVK_laNQFjota3lKOAOrKYUeLiNuY0X2KbwUMr3FwtR6AEcgmtJRaeeS5MXShAfkaRb6jIDR6yFDHVX6tu-CpVjW7RywWoSGQiwCIR1sWVAozyfeLzqCeRUWQ9n81U-Ki9LqsG1VZ3Zbwh4v5vKFJ8o1yIELsSS2ZrV1b9H5CmCxAX8eibNqrWm2JYg-Akd5mIzgHTOaon4wXVz1H1blluzSIpyf2fdQZmIIo-1HURZLFKantP_gsI8MOGgcjAJcS2FmFLOSYGHohpfhrdYTH1_O04B0um7VPeiZ3YZ1sK_nZ3VAWD7R1r8MHs6-d61nEPdNsbVR4i6Uw598pYqtprTiNmhk2PI6OFroSyMdX8mTY64SVO89pWGikLY0FCtGt2yq2dn2VBYm1wKLB9eJdWRy9yKVAV390LhUSv1/https%3A%2F%2Fmainframeperformancetopics.com

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From:   "R.S." 
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Date:   12/06/2020 09:51
Subject:    [EXTERNAL] Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants
to retire mainframes")
Sent by:IBM Mainframe Discussion List 



Well, I wrote an article on my internal company blog, recently. It was
exactly about messages and codes.
People couldn't believe in some statements:
1. Every message has its own ID. Fortunately readers agreed that msg ID
is far better than "Oops! Something went wrong, try again later".
2. Every message is documented, and there is "Messages and Codes"
bookshelf. And there are books and even bookshelves. And it was
available from Internet for 20+ years.
3. Every message ID has prefix which clearly describes that it comes
from CICS, DB2, RACF... (DFH, DSN, ICH...)
4. Message description in the book is more than "Something is wrong. Try
again later".
5. Return code has meaning. It is more than "zero vs non-zero" RC.

I wish I could put here some pictures with funny/annoying Windows
messages here.  ;-)

--
Radoslaw Skorupka
Lodz, Poland






W dniu 10.06.2020 o 22:02, Steve Smith pisze:
> I take this example as merely an example.  IBM & the software industry
are
> notoriously bad at getting these right.
>
> At one end, you have "Oops, something went wrong."  -- Windows 10 (and
> yeah, the day I started using Windows 10).
>
> At the other, IDC3009I.  Sheesh.
>
> Counter to those, the IMS message doesn't seem quite so bad... it's
> (presumably) accurate, and fairly precise.  You could argue it could be
> worded more simply, or that it should provide the detailed codes.
>
> In my experience, messages get very little attention or quality review.
> I'm sure it varies a lot.
>
> sas
>
> On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 3:50 PM Paul Gilmartin <
> 000433f07816-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 10 Jun 2020 17:02:40 +, Frank Swarbrick wrote:
>>
>>> Here's a quote from a message I posted to this list in 2009:
>>>
>>> "I have a very basic one to complain about:
>>>
>>> DFS0929I BLDL FAILED FOR MEMBER --DDMPPSZ
>>>
>>> This really means that the specified PSB DDMPPSZ is not in the
specified
>> IMS library.  Why can't it just say that?  As an application programmer
do
>> I really need to know that BLDL means, well, whatever it means?
>> The practice was established over a half century ago when every
programmer
>> could be presumed to have at least a superficial knowledge of the
entire
>> OS/360
>> reference library.  And storage was too precious to support elaborate
>> messages.
>>
>> That time has passed.
>>
>> The practice persists.
>>
>> -- gil
>>


==

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- powiadom nas o tym w mailu zwrotnym (dziękujemy!),
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Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

2020-06-12 Thread Martin Packer

I wonder, though, whether newbies can easily tell the difference between 
eg "DFS" and "DFH". Particularly poignant, that pair. :-)

So we all know "ICH" and, latterly "IRR", (FSVO "latterly" :-) ) are RACF. 
But do newbies pick this up quickly?

Cheers, Martin

Martin Packer

zChampion, Systems Investigator & Performance Troubleshooter, IBM

+44-7802-245-584

email: martin_pac...@uk.ibm.com

Twitter / Facebook IDs: MartinPacker

Blog: https://mainframeperformancetopics.com

Podcast Series (With Marna Walle): https://developer.ibm.com/tv/mpt/or 

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/mainframe-performance-topics/id1127943573?mt=2

Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCu_65HaYgksbF6Q8SQ4oOvA

From:   "R.S." 
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Date:   12/06/2020 09:51
Subject:    [EXTERNAL] Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants 
to retire mainframes")
Sent by:IBM Mainframe Discussion List 

Well, I wrote an article on my internal company blog, recently. It was 
exactly about messages and codes.
People couldn't believe in some statements:
1. Every message has its own ID. Fortunately readers agreed that msg ID 
is far better than "Oops! Something went wrong, try again later".
2. Every message is documented, and there is "Messages and Codes" 
bookshelf. And there are books and even bookshelves. And it was 
available from Internet for 20+ years.
3. Every message ID has prefix which clearly describes that it comes 
from CICS, DB2, RACF... (DFH, DSN, ICH...)
4. Message description in the book is more than "Something is wrong. Try 
again later".
5. Return code has meaning. It is more than "zero vs non-zero" RC.

I wish I could put here some pictures with funny/annoying Windows 
messages here.  ;-)

-- 
Radoslaw Skorupka
Lodz, Poland

W dniu 10.06.2020 o 22:02, Steve Smith pisze:
> I take this example as merely an example.  IBM & the software industry 
are
> notoriously bad at getting these right.
>
> At one end, you have "Oops, something went wrong."  -- Windows 10 (and
> yeah, the day I started using Windows 10).
>
> At the other, IDC3009I.  Sheesh.
>
> Counter to those, the IMS message doesn't seem quite so bad... it's
> (presumably) accurate, and fairly precise.  You could argue it could be
> worded more simply, or that it should provide the detailed codes.
>
> In my experience, messages get very little attention or quality review.
> I'm sure it varies a lot.
>
> sas
>
> On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 3:50 PM Paul Gilmartin <
> 000433f07816-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 10 Jun 2020 17:02:40 +, Frank Swarbrick wrote:
>>
>>> Here's a quote from a message I posted to this list in 2009:
>>>
>>> "I have a very basic one to complain about:
>>>
>>> DFS0929I BLDL FAILED FOR MEMBER --DDMPPSZ
>>>
>>> This really means that the specified PSB DDMPPSZ is not in the 
specified
>> IMS library.  Why can't it just say that?  As an application programmer 
do
>> I really need to know that BLDL means, well, whatever it means?
>> The practice was established over a half century ago when every 
programmer
>> could be presumed to have at least a superficial knowledge of the 
entire
>> OS/360
>> reference library.  And storage was too precious to support elaborate
>> messages.
>>
>> That time has passed.
>>
>> The practice persists.
>>
>> -- gil
>>

==

Jeśli nie jesteś adresatem tej wiadomości:

- powiadom nas o tym w mailu zwrotnym (dziękujemy!),
- usuń trwale tę wiadomość (i wszystkie kopie, które wydrukowałeś lub 
zapisałeś na dysku).
Wiadomość ta może zawierać chronione prawem informacje, które może 
wykorzystać tylko adresat.Przypominamy, że każdy, kto rozpowszechnia 
(kopiuje, rozprowadza) tę wiadomość lub podejmuje podobne działania, 
narusza prawo i może podlegać karze.

mBank S.A. z siedzibą w Warszawie, ul. Senatorska 18, 00-950 Warszawa,
www.mBank.pl, e-mail: kont...@mbank.pl. Sąd Rejonowy dla m. st. Warszawy 
XII Wydział Gospodarczy Krajowego Rejestru Sądowego, KRS 025237, NIP: 
526-021-50-88. Kapitał zakładowy (opłacony w całości) według stanu na 
01.01.2020 r. wynosi 169.401.468 złotych.

If you are not the addressee of this message:

- let us know by replying to this e-mail (thank you!),
- delete this message permanently (including all the copies which you have 
printed out or saved).
This message may contain legally protected information, which may be used 
exclusively by the addressee.Please be reminded that anyone who 
disseminates (copies, distributes) this message or takes any similar 
action, violates the law and ma

Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

2020-06-12 Thread R.S.

Well, I wrote an article on my internal company blog, recently. It was 
exactly about messages and codes.

People couldn't believe in some statements:
1. Every message has its own ID. Fortunately readers agreed that msg ID 
is far better than "Oops! Something went wrong, try again later".
2. Every message is documented, and there is "Messages and Codes" 
bookshelf. And there are books and even bookshelves. And it was 
available from Internet for 20+ years.
3. Every message ID has prefix which clearly describes that it comes 
from CICS, DB2, RACF... (DFH, DSN, ICH...)
4. Message description in the book is more than "Something is wrong. Try 
again later".

5. Return code has meaning. It is more than "zero vs non-zero" RC.

I wish I could put here some pictures with funny/annoying Windows 
messages here.  ;-)


--
Radoslaw Skorupka
Lodz, Poland






W dniu 10.06.2020 o 22:02, Steve Smith pisze:

I take this example as merely an example.  IBM & the software industry are
notoriously bad at getting these right.

At one end, you have "Oops, something went wrong."  -- Windows 10 (and
yeah, the day I started using Windows 10).

At the other, IDC3009I.  Sheesh.

Counter to those, the IMS message doesn't seem quite so bad... it's
(presumably) accurate, and fairly precise.  You could argue it could be
worded more simply, or that it should provide the detailed codes.

In my experience, messages get very little attention or quality review.
I'm sure it varies a lot.

sas

On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 3:50 PM Paul Gilmartin <
000433f07816-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu> wrote:


On Wed, 10 Jun 2020 17:02:40 +, Frank Swarbrick wrote:


Here's a quote from a message I posted to this list in 2009:

"I have a very basic one to complain about:

DFS0929I BLDL FAILED FOR MEMBER --DDMPPSZ

This really means that the specified PSB DDMPPSZ is not in the specified

IMS library.  Why can't it just say that?  As an application programmer do
I really need to know that BLDL means, well, whatever it means?
The practice was established over a half century ago when every programmer
could be presumed to have at least a superficial knowledge of the entire
OS/360
reference library.  And storage was too precious to support elaborate
messages.

That time has passed.

The practice persists.

-- gil




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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

Long ago in a galaxy far away, there was a telephone company called Gong, Owned 
by Andromeda Telepath and Teleport. When a customer called in with an outage, 
they would go to the appropriate equipment, clean and reseat all of the 
contacts, and then test. They would then report back to the customer that they 
saw no sign of a problem.

In some cases the answer is timing. Certainly running GTF is going to introduce 
some delays, and there are equivalent effects in other areas.


--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3


From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of Bob 
Bridges [robhbrid...@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, June 12, 2020 12:15 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

I used to imagine the poor mechanics listening skeptically to a young clueless 
driver saying "I swear, mister, it was making this awful noise just a minute 
ago...!"  I wouldn't have believed her either.  Then I started in end-user 
support.

I have implicitly believed those stories ever since.  I tell some hapless users 
that their machines saw me coming and immediately cleaned up their act.  I'm 
mostly kidding, but how else to explain it when it happens so often?

---
Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313

/* The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing in the right 
place, but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.  -Dorothy 
Nevill */

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of Tom Brennan
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2020 13:30

My favorite is when someone is repeatedly getting an error, but when
they call me over and without doing anything differently, the error
magically goes away.  I always said this was because the computer knows
that I simply won't stand for such insubordination and it knows that I
know where the off switch is.

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-11 Thread Bob Bridges

I used to imagine the poor mechanics listening skeptically to a young clueless 
driver saying "I swear, mister, it was making this awful noise just a minute 
ago...!"  I wouldn't have believed her either.  Then I started in end-user 
support.

I have implicitly believed those stories ever since.  I tell some hapless users 
that their machines saw me coming and immediately cleaned up their act.  I'm 
mostly kidding, but how else to explain it when it happens so often?

---
Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313

/* The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing in the right 
place, but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.  -Dorothy 
Nevill */

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of Tom Brennan
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2020 13:30

My favorite is when someone is repeatedly getting an error, but when 
they call me over and without doing anything differently, the error 
magically goes away.  I always said this was because the computer knows 
that I simply won't stand for such insubordination and it knows that I 
know where the off switch is.

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

? GTF?  Generalized Trace Facility?

Is there another GTF in z/OS?

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3

From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of 
Paul Gilmartin [000433f07816-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu]
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2020 2:21 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

On Thu, 11 Jun 2020 17:47:46 +, Seymour J Metz wrote:

>I call that the "GTF effect"; the problem never manifests when I have 
>diagnostic measures in place to capture failure data.
>
GTF?  Generalized Trace Facility?

A colleague once used the term "Heisenberg effect" for a performance
monitor that reported that most of the CPU time was being spent in the
performance monitor.

And I struggled with a vendor compiler when my program arithmetic
checked in optimized mode but produced the result I intended in debug
mode.  Vendor support told me (correctly) that the construct I (tried to)
use was documented as "unpredictable".  WAD?

On Thu, 11 Jun 2020 17:51:13 +, Seymour J Metz wrote:

>> DBD  or PSB library.
>
>In a kinder, more gentle world, the message would tell you which.
>
I consider "either-or" messages irresponsible.  Even in the case where
a single test and BC instruction may detect significantly different  errors.
More likely, middleware fails to distinguish or preserve distinct reason
codes supplied by the base level.

The M Reason explanations are rife with "either or".

-- gil

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-11 Thread Frank Swarbrick

Apparently that world is not this world.

From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List  on behalf of 
Seymour J Metz 
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2020 11:51 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU 
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

> DBD  or PSB library.

In a kinder, more gentle world, the message would tell you which.

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3

From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of 
Frank Swarbrick [frank.swarbr...@outlook.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2020 1:01 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

Here are all of the possibly relevant parts from the JESMSGLG for a similar 
occurrence that I just caused.

+*DFS0929I BLDL FAILED FOR MEMBER --ABCDEFG
IEA995I SYMPTOM DUMP OUTPUT  830
  USER COMPLETION CODE=0929
 TIME=10.52.44  SEQ=18497  CPU=  ASID=0038
 PSW AT TIME OF ERROR  078D1000   9012762C  ILC 2  INTC 0D
   ACTIVE MODULE   ADDRESS=_1011A000  OFFSET=D62C
   NAME=DFSDLBL0
   DATA AT PSW  10127626 - D234181F  0A0DD71C  D200D200
   GR 0:    1: 83A1
  2: 7660   3: 84B0
  4: 0005D060   5: 7658
  6: 10126358   7: 0005D060
  8: 00019928   9: 00019F68
  A:    B: 0001
  C: 1011C048   D: 101260B0
  E: 90127E9E   F: 83A1
 END OF SYMPTOM DUMP
DFS627I IMS RTM CLEANUP ( EOT ) COMPLETE FOR JS DDADMP  .PROC01  .STEP01  ,RC=00
IEF450I DDADMP STEP01 PROC01 - ABEND=S000 U0929 REASON=  832

There are no additional DDs beyond this and the standard JESJCL and JESYSMSG 
which have no additional relevant data.

Of course if you look up the error in the manual it does provide slightly more 
useful information.

DFS0929I

 BLDL FAILED FOR MEMBER -- member name

 Explanation
 ~~~
 A BLDL was issued for the named member. The member was not found in the DBD
 or PSB library.

 System action
 ~
 Abend 0929 is issued if batch DL/I was running. ACBGEN processing continues
 if the ACBGEN utility was being run.

 Programmer response
 ~~~
 Correct the error in the appropriate library, and rerun the program.

From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List  on behalf of 
Seymour J Metz 
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 11:47 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU 
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

The problem with that message is not that it mentions BLDL, but that it fails 
to mention other relevant data. At a minimum, what was the ddname and what was 
the return code. Ideally I'd like secondary messages listing the libraries in 
the concatenation.

A user ABEND without a message is hard to justify. Are you sure that it wasn't 
in the joblog?

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3

From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of 
Frank Swarbrick [frank.swarbr...@outlook.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 1:02 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

Here's a quote from a message I posted to this list in 2009:

"I have a very basic one to complain about:

DFS0929I BLDL FAILED FOR MEMBER --DDMPPSZ

This really means that the specified PSB DDMPPSZ is not in the specified IMS 
library.  Why can't it just say that?  As an application programmer do I really 
need to know that BLDL means, well, whatever it means?

Of course IMS has some that are even worse.  Sometimes I just get something 
like:
USER COMPLETION CODE=
without any message at all.  The first time I ran in to it it took me a heck of 
a time to figure out I need to look in the IMS manual to find out what the 
error was.  For all I could tell it was a user application error, but I 
couldn't see what.  Now all of the other developers on our VSE to z/OS 
conversion team just ask me what the errors are, because trying to find them in 
the manuals is too often too painful.  Hopefully I'll get them trained some day!

I've got to say, coming from VSE their error messages are, in general, much 
better.  Of course as a developer I hate dealing with creating error messages 
for my own apps, so I can understand why IBM has such issues...  :-)"

Things have not improved much, if it all, in this regard in the last ten years. 
 

From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List  on behalf of 
Mike Schwab 
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 8:42 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU 
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

Yep.  We used to get a lot of errors for out of volumes in a storage
groups, and the users would want us to add more volumes.  For several
calls I would point out that the data set had a very small primary and
secondary space value.  I would go through all the extents on one
volume, then proceed through the

Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-11 Thread Paul Gilmartin

On Thu, 11 Jun 2020 17:47:46 +, Seymour J Metz wrote:

>I call that the "GTF effect"; the problem never manifests when I have 
>diagnostic measures in place to capture failure data.
> 
GTF?  Generalized Trace Facility?

A colleague once used the term "Heisenberg effect" for a performance
monitor that reported that most of the CPU time was being spent in the
performance monitor.

And I struggled with a vendor compiler when my program arithmetic
checked in optimized mode but produced the result I intended in debug
mode.  Vendor support told me (correctly) that the construct I (tried to)
use was documented as "unpredictable".  WAD?

On Thu, 11 Jun 2020 17:51:13 +, Seymour J Metz wrote:

>> DBD  or PSB library.
>
>In a kinder, more gentle world, the message would tell you which.
>
I consider "either-or" messages irresponsible.  Even in the case where
a single test and BC instruction may detect significantly different  errors.
More likely, middleware fails to distinguish or preserve distinct reason
codes supplied by the base level.

The M Reason explanations are rife with "either or".

-- gil

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Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

2020-06-11 Thread Allan Staller

Nope!

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List  On Behalf Of 
Seymour J Metz
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2020 10:04 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

[CAUTION: This Email is from outside the Organization. Unless you trust the 
sender, Don’t click links or open attachments as it may be a Phishing email, 
which can steal your Information and compromise your Computer.]

Any message whose action is given as "contact your systems programmer" is just 
as bad. Has IBM finally gotten rid of all of those?

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
https://apc01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http:%2F%2Fmason.gmu.edu%2F~smetz3data=02%7C01%7Callan.staller%40HCL.COM%7C5d87b6ba82604e73cc9308d80e18af0c%7C189de737c93a4f5a8b686f4ca9941912%7C0%7C0%7C637274846480687573sdata=u4EfCy7ayukIXREJxmztud3J1hWr7ajxrlmgk56KWpc%3Dreserved=0

From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of 
Timothy Sipples [sipp...@sg.ibm.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2020 4:42 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

This pair of error messages was a design mistake:

OS/2 !! Sys01475
OS/2 !! Sys02027

That's a case of national language considerations run amok. That was the only 
pair of messages you saw on your screen when you formatted a diskette with 
OS/2, left the diskette in the primary drive, and rebooted the typical PC of 
that era (that didn't automatically try to boot from another device when there 
was a diskette in the primary drive).

A diskette's boot sector doesn't have much room, so the designers had to be 
concise. They wanted to include at least one error code, and they did.
But then instead of some portion of the planet not understanding what happened, 
very nearly the entire planet didn't understand what happened.
:-)

A better design would have used a global message like this:

OS/2 SYS01475: Diskette in Drive!

That's exactly the same number of characters, assuming the new line was one 
character. (If not, the colon could have been omitted.) Yes, "Diskette in 
Drive!" is technically English, but even so it would have been much more 
broadly, globally understood than mystery error codes.

Even this one would have been better:

OS/2 SYS01475 Unbootable Diskette

Or:

SYS01475: Data Diskette in Drive!

Pretty much anything with the word "Diskette" (the term IBM preferred instead 
of "Floppy") would have given users a clue. Even this:

OS/2 !! Sys01475
No Boot Diskette

- - - - - - - - - -
Timothy Sipples
I.T. Architect Executive
Digital Asset & Other Industry Solutions IBM Z & LinuxONE
- - - - - - - - - -
E-Mail: sipp...@sg.ibm.com

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

The telephone folks used to close tickets with CWT -- "cleared while testing." 
In other words, they could not reproduce.

Another support favorite:

Customer: You've got to help us. It's happening all the time. It's really 
killing us. We're dead in the water without a fix.
Tech: Add a SYSUDUMP DD statement, reproduce the problem and send us the dump.
Customer: Oh, well, we'll have to see. It's really hard to reproduce.

Charles

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of Tom Brennan
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2020 10:30 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

At least in that case you can hopefully reproduce the error :)
It's the one-time lost error messages that as a support person, you 
sometimes have to say, "Oh well"

My favorite is when someone is repeatedly getting an error, but when 
they call me over and without doing anything differently, the error 
magically goes away.  I always said this was because the computer knows 
that I simply won't stand for such insubordination and it knows that I 
know where the off switch is.

On 6/11/2020 9:42 AM, Bob Bridges wrote:
> My favorite is a marketing guy I was supporting.  He called for my help with 
> some problem that had occurred - I don't remember what exactly, probably with 
> a DYL-280II program that he'd written with my help - and, as always, I asked 
> him what the error message had said.  "Oh, it said some damn thing" he 
> retorted.
> 
> I think he was laughing at himself as he said it, but he said it.
> 
> ---
> Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313
> 

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-11 Thread Jesse 1 Robinson

There's another factor in the Betamax vs. VHS struggle. I went into a 
department store to buy my first camcorder in the early 80s. I chose a Beta 
model. The sales guy said, "Most folks these days are buying VHS. You can only 
exchange tapes with the same technology. Pick out a VHS model. Take it home but 
don't open the box. Check with some friends and relatives to see what *they* 
have. If it's mostly Beta, then bring back the VHS and exchange it." 

I never went back. 

.
.
J.O.Skip Robinson
Southern California Edison Company
Electric Dragon Team Paddler 
SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager
323-715-0595 Mobile
626-543-6132 Office ⇐=== NEW
robin...@sce.com

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List  On Behalf Of 
John McKown
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 8:14 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: (External):Re: [External] Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

CAUTION EXTERNAL EMAIL

On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 9:21 AM Lionel B Dyck  wrote:

> Y'all stop using logic and reason - this is an emotional issue that 
> the author and others are invested in and has nothing to do with IBM 
> effectively telling the world that the mainframe is dead based on all 
> the layoffs that have occurred over the last 20-25 years, or that IBM 
> continues to offload software development or outright sells IBM 
> software to other companies, or that IBM has bought into the Cloud and 
> has reduced their investment in developing z/OS, or . . . .
>
> And then there is the vast amounts of money to be made by replacing a 
> mainframe - I'm sure that those vendors offering those services only 
> have the best interests of the current mainframe users at heart.
>
> It's Beta vs VHS all over again
>

Beta lost due to marketing idiocy. It was superior to VHS, technically, but 
"overpriced" compared to VHS. So the consumer went with the inferior but more 
affordable VHS. You're right -- exactly like z/OS vs. Windows and zSeries vs. 
AMD/Intel.

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

> DBD  or PSB library.

In a kinder, more gentle world, the message would tell you which.


--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3


From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of 
Frank Swarbrick [frank.swarbr...@outlook.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2020 1:01 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

Here are all of the possibly relevant parts from the JESMSGLG for a similar 
occurrence that I just caused.

+*DFS0929I BLDL FAILED FOR MEMBER --ABCDEFG
IEA995I SYMPTOM DUMP OUTPUT  830
  USER COMPLETION CODE=0929
 TIME=10.52.44  SEQ=18497  CPU=  ASID=0038
 PSW AT TIME OF ERROR  078D1000   9012762C  ILC 2  INTC 0D
   ACTIVE MODULE   ADDRESS=_1011A000  OFFSET=D62C
   NAME=DFSDLBL0
   DATA AT PSW  10127626 - D234181F  0A0DD71C  D200D200
   GR 0:    1: 83A1
  2: 7660   3: 84B0
  4: 0005D060   5: 7658
  6: 10126358   7: 0005D060
  8: 00019928   9: 00019F68
  A:    B: 0001
  C: 1011C048   D: 101260B0
  E: 90127E9E   F: 83A1
 END OF SYMPTOM DUMP
DFS627I IMS RTM CLEANUP ( EOT ) COMPLETE FOR JS DDADMP  .PROC01  .STEP01  ,RC=00
IEF450I DDADMP STEP01 PROC01 - ABEND=S000 U0929 REASON=  832

There are no additional DDs beyond this and the standard JESJCL and JESYSMSG 
which have no additional relevant data.

Of course if you look up the error in the manual it does provide slightly more 
useful information.

DFS0929I

 BLDL FAILED FOR MEMBER -- member name

 Explanation
 ~~~
 A BLDL was issued for the named member. The member was not found in the DBD
 or PSB library.

 System action
 ~
 Abend 0929 is issued if batch DL/I was running. ACBGEN processing continues
 if the ACBGEN utility was being run.

 Programmer response
 ~~~
 Correct the error in the appropriate library, and rerun the program.




From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List  on behalf of 
Seymour J Metz 
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 11:47 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU 
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

The problem with that message is not that it mentions BLDL, but that it fails 
to mention other relevant data. At a minimum, what was the ddname and what was 
the return code. Ideally I'd like secondary messages listing the libraries in 
the concatenation.

A user ABEND without a message is hard to justify. Are you sure that it wasn't 
in the joblog?


--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3


From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of 
Frank Swarbrick [frank.swarbr...@outlook.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 1:02 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

Here's a quote from a message I posted to this list in 2009:

"I have a very basic one to complain about:

DFS0929I BLDL FAILED FOR MEMBER --DDMPPSZ

This really means that the specified PSB DDMPPSZ is not in the specified IMS 
library.  Why can't it just say that?  As an application programmer do I really 
need to know that BLDL means, well, whatever it means?

Of course IMS has some that are even worse.  Sometimes I just get something 
like:
USER COMPLETION CODE=
without any message at all.  The first time I ran in to it it took me a heck of 
a time to figure out I need to look in the IMS manual to find out what the 
error was.  For all I could tell it was a user application error, but I 
couldn't see what.  Now all of the other developers on our VSE to z/OS 
conversion team just ask me what the errors are, because trying to find them in 
the manuals is too often too painful.  Hopefully I'll get them trained some day!

I've got to say, coming from VSE their error messages are, in general, much 
better.  Of course as a developer I hate dealing with creating error messages 
for my own apps, so I can understand why IBM has such issues...  :-)"

Things have not improved much, if it all, in this regard in the last ten years. 
 

From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List  on behalf of 
Mike Schwab 
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 8:42 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU 
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

Yep.  We used to get a lot of errors for out of volumes in a storage
groups, and the users would want us to add more volumes.  For several
calls I would point out that the data set had a very small primary and
secondary space value.  I would go through all the extents on one
volume, then proceed through the rest, and run out volumes despite
lots of space in the storage group.  They didn't want to reallocate,
so I suggested they migrate and recall the dataset.  Then the existing
space would be in 1 extent on 1 volume and plenty of extents and
volumes to extend onto.  The prob

Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

I call that the "GTF effect"; the problem never manifests when I have 
diagnostic measures in place to capture failure data.


--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3


From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of Tom 
Brennan [t...@tombrennansoftware.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2020 1:29 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

At least in that case you can hopefully reproduce the error :)
It's the one-time lost error messages that as a support person, you
sometimes have to say, "Oh well"

My favorite is when someone is repeatedly getting an error, but when
they call me over and without doing anything differently, the error
magically goes away.  I always said this was because the computer knows
that I simply won't stand for such insubordination and it knows that I
know where the off switch is.

On 6/11/2020 9:42 AM, Bob Bridges wrote:
> My favorite is a marketing guy I was supporting.  He called for my help with 
> some problem that had occurred - I don't remember what exactly, probably with 
> a DYL-280II program that he'd written with my help - and, as always, I asked 
> him what the error message had said.  "Oh, it said some damn thing" he 
> retorted.
>
> I think he was laughing at himself as he said it, but he said it.
>
> ---
> Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313
>

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-11 Thread Tom Brennan


At least in that case you can hopefully reproduce the error :)
It's the one-time lost error messages that as a support person, you 
sometimes have to say, "Oh well"


My favorite is when someone is repeatedly getting an error, but when 
they call me over and without doing anything differently, the error 
magically goes away.  I always said this was because the computer knows 
that I simply won't stand for such insubordination and it knows that I 
know where the off switch is.


On 6/11/2020 9:42 AM, Bob Bridges wrote:

My favorite is a marketing guy I was supporting.  He called for my help with some problem 
that had occurred - I don't remember what exactly, probably with a DYL-280II program that 
he'd written with my help - and, as always, I asked him what the error message had said.  
"Oh, it said some damn thing" he retorted.

I think he was laughing at himself as he said it, but he said it.

---
Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313



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Re: [External] Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

My other favorite. We had someone call about an installation problem. The 
solution was rather involved so our support tech said "it is covered in detail 
in the Installation Manual" whereupon the customer guy said "oh, I don't have 
the manuals. Bob has the manuals. He's in charge of documentation. I'm just in 
charge of installation."

Charles


-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of Bob Bridges
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2020 9:42 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: [External] Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

My favorite is a marketing guy I was supporting.  He called for my help with 
some problem that had occurred - I don't remember what exactly, probably with a 
DYL-280II program that he'd written with my help - and, as always, I asked him 
what the error message had said.  "Oh, it said some damn thing" he retorted.

I think he was laughing at himself as he said it, but he said it.

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-11 Thread Frank Swarbrick

Here are all of the possibly relevant parts from the JESMSGLG for a similar 
occurrence that I just caused.

+*DFS0929I BLDL FAILED FOR MEMBER --ABCDEFG
IEA995I SYMPTOM DUMP OUTPUT  830
  USER COMPLETION CODE=0929
 TIME=10.52.44  SEQ=18497  CPU=  ASID=0038
 PSW AT TIME OF ERROR  078D1000   9012762C  ILC 2  INTC 0D
   ACTIVE MODULE   ADDRESS=_1011A000  OFFSET=D62C
   NAME=DFSDLBL0
   DATA AT PSW  10127626 - D234181F  0A0DD71C  D200D200
   GR 0:    1: 83A1
  2: 7660   3: 84B0
  4: 0005D060   5: 7658
  6: 10126358   7: 0005D060
  8: 00019928   9: 00019F68
  A:    B: 0001
  C: 1011C048   D: 101260B0
  E: 90127E9E   F: 83A1
 END OF SYMPTOM DUMP
DFS627I IMS RTM CLEANUP ( EOT ) COMPLETE FOR JS DDADMP  .PROC01  .STEP01  ,RC=00
IEF450I DDADMP STEP01 PROC01 - ABEND=S000 U0929 REASON=  832

There are no additional DDs beyond this and the standard JESJCL and JESYSMSG 
which have no additional relevant data.

Of course if you look up the error in the manual it does provide slightly more 
useful information.

DFS0929I

 BLDL FAILED FOR MEMBER -- member name

 Explanation
 ~~~
 A BLDL was issued for the named member. The member was not found in the DBD
 or PSB library.

 System action
 ~
 Abend 0929 is issued if batch DL/I was running. ACBGEN processing continues
 if the ACBGEN utility was being run.

 Programmer response
 ~~~
 Correct the error in the appropriate library, and rerun the program.

From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List  on behalf of 
Seymour J Metz 
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 11:47 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU 
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

The problem with that message is not that it mentions BLDL, but that it fails 
to mention other relevant data. At a minimum, what was the ddname and what was 
the return code. Ideally I'd like secondary messages listing the libraries in 
the concatenation.

A user ABEND without a message is hard to justify. Are you sure that it wasn't 
in the joblog?

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3

From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of 
Frank Swarbrick [frank.swarbr...@outlook.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 1:02 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

Here's a quote from a message I posted to this list in 2009:

"I have a very basic one to complain about:

DFS0929I BLDL FAILED FOR MEMBER --DDMPPSZ

This really means that the specified PSB DDMPPSZ is not in the specified IMS 
library.  Why can't it just say that?  As an application programmer do I really 
need to know that BLDL means, well, whatever it means?

Of course IMS has some that are even worse.  Sometimes I just get something 
like:
USER COMPLETION CODE=
without any message at all.  The first time I ran in to it it took me a heck of 
a time to figure out I need to look in the IMS manual to find out what the 
error was.  For all I could tell it was a user application error, but I 
couldn't see what.  Now all of the other developers on our VSE to z/OS 
conversion team just ask me what the errors are, because trying to find them in 
the manuals is too often too painful.  Hopefully I'll get them trained some day!

I've got to say, coming from VSE their error messages are, in general, much 
better.  Of course as a developer I hate dealing with creating error messages 
for my own apps, so I can understand why IBM has such issues...  :-)"

Things have not improved much, if it all, in this regard in the last ten years. 
 

From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List  on behalf of 
Mike Schwab 
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 8:42 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU 
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

Yep.  We used to get a lot of errors for out of volumes in a storage
groups, and the users would want us to add more volumes.  For several
calls I would point out that the data set had a very small primary and
secondary space value.  I would go through all the extents on one
volume, then proceed through the rest, and run out volumes despite
lots of space in the storage group.  They didn't want to reallocate,
so I suggested they migrate and recall the dataset.  Then the existing
space would be in 1 extent on 1 volume and plenty of extents and
volumes to extend onto.  The problem started going away after that.

Would the new 1st extent on the first volume from the recall become
the default 1st allocation on subsequent volumes?

On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 12:48 AM Seymour J Metz  wrote:
>
> My pet peeve is the default for SPACE; "Absolute track not available" is not 
> a user friendly error message for forgetting to specify SPACE.
>
>
> --
> Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
> http://maso

Re: [External] Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-11 Thread Bob Bridges

My favorite is a marketing guy I was supporting.  He called for my help with 
some problem that had occurred - I don't remember what exactly, probably with a 
DYL-280II program that he'd written with my help - and, as always, I asked him 
what the error message had said.  "Oh, it said some damn thing" he retorted.

I think he was laughing at himself as he said it, but he said it.

---
Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313

/* My aunt has rather selfishly suspended her production of chocolate cake 
because of the whole "broken hip" thing, leaving me to try to find a worthwhile 
substituteI purchased a box with a picture of a cake on it, but inside were 
all these so-called "ingredients" that, once I'd mixed them and baked them and 
put out the flames, tasted suspiciously like one of my mother's chocolate 
hockey pucks.  -Bruce Cameron */

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of Charles Mills
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2020 11:26

...as a guy who has been responsible for product management and a support desk, 
I used to run around the office yelling that our next product was only going to 
have one error message "AN ERROR OCCURRED" after yet another exchange like this:

Tech: XYZ support, may I help you?
Customer: Yes, XYZ blew up yesterday.
Tech: Our apologies. What was the error message?
Customer: Something about an error occurred.
Tech: What was the exact message number? We could use that to troubleshoot the 
issue.
Customer: I don't know. We already deleted the SYSOUT.

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Re: [External] Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

Well, in the TSO environment there's a service to build messages from 
templates, plugging in variables. ISPF has similar services.


--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3


From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of 
Charles Mills [charl...@mcn.org]
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2020 11:26 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: [External] Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

That's cool, the is/are and pluralization. I never bothered -- I have always 
gone with (s) as in "You have %d dog(s)"

Yes, I really upped my error message game when I went from assembler to C++. 
Yes, you can do anything in assembler, but unless you have or devote time to 
developing macros such as you describe, you tend to end up with less 
user-friendly messages. With C/C++ there is no excuse.

On the other hand, as a guy who has been responsible for product management and 
a support desk, I used to run around the office yelling that our next product 
was only going to have one error message "AN ERROR OCCURRED" after yet another 
exchange like this:

Tech: XYZ support, may I help you?
Customer: Yes, XYZ blew up yesterday.
Tech: Our apologies. What was the error message?
Customer: Something about an error occurred.
Tech: What was the exact message number? We could use that to troubleshoot the 
issue.
Customer: I don't know. We already deleted the SYSOUT.

Charles


-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of Tom Brennan
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 4:33 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: [External] Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

Things like numeric conversion and scooting text around are difficult in
assembler, so I would tend to put that off until later [1].  Then one
day I coded a macro and underlying subroutine so I could do something
like this:

#PRINTF SYSPRINT,'DFS0929I BLDL ON DDNAME %s FAILED with RC=%d FOR
MEMBER %s',(DDNAME,(R15),MEMBER)

... and suddenly I was far more likely to include the extra details with
the initial coding.

I just looked at some doc for that old code and found this section, so I
guess I was having some fun with various options to help display what I
assume is correct English:

.*  PLURALIZER EXAMPLE (options P and A):
.*
.*  #SPRINTF OUTBUF,'You have %pd dogs',NUMDOGS
.*
.*   produces:  You have 1 dog
.*  You have 2 dogs
.*
.*  #SPRINTF OUTBUF,'There %ad dogs',NUMDOGS
.*
.*   produces:  There is 1 dog
.*  There are 2 dogs

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Re: [External] Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

That's cool, the is/are and pluralization. I never bothered -- I have always 
gone with (s) as in "You have %d dog(s)"

Yes, I really upped my error message game when I went from assembler to C++. 
Yes, you can do anything in assembler, but unless you have or devote time to 
developing macros such as you describe, you tend to end up with less 
user-friendly messages. With C/C++ there is no excuse.

On the other hand, as a guy who has been responsible for product management and 
a support desk, I used to run around the office yelling that our next product 
was only going to have one error message "AN ERROR OCCURRED" after yet another 
exchange like this:

Tech: XYZ support, may I help you?
Customer: Yes, XYZ blew up yesterday.
Tech: Our apologies. What was the error message?
Customer: Something about an error occurred.
Tech: What was the exact message number? We could use that to troubleshoot the 
issue.
Customer: I don't know. We already deleted the SYSOUT.

Charles


-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of Tom Brennan
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 4:33 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: [External] Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

Things like numeric conversion and scooting text around are difficult in 
assembler, so I would tend to put that off until later [1].  Then one 
day I coded a macro and underlying subroutine so I could do something 
like this:

#PRINTF SYSPRINT,'DFS0929I BLDL ON DDNAME %s FAILED with RC=%d FOR 
MEMBER %s',(DDNAME,(R15),MEMBER)

... and suddenly I was far more likely to include the extra details with 
the initial coding.

I just looked at some doc for that old code and found this section, so I 
guess I was having some fun with various options to help display what I 
assume is correct English:

.*  PLURALIZER EXAMPLE (options P and A):
.*
.*  #SPRINTF OUTBUF,'You have %pd dogs',NUMDOGS
.*
.*   produces:  You have 1 dog
.*  You have 2 dogs
.*
.*  #SPRINTF OUTBUF,'There %ad dogs',NUMDOGS
.*
.*   produces:  There is 1 dog
.*  There are 2 dogs

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Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

Any message whose action is given as "contact your systems programmer" is just 
as bad. Has IBM finally gotten rid of all of those?


--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3


From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of 
Timothy Sipples [sipp...@sg.ibm.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2020 4:42 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

This pair of error messages was a design mistake:

OS/2 !! Sys01475
OS/2 !! Sys02027

That's a case of national language considerations run amok. That was the
only pair of messages you saw on your screen when you formatted a diskette
with OS/2, left the diskette in the primary drive, and rebooted the
typical PC of that era (that didn't automatically try to boot from another
device when there was a diskette in the primary drive).

A diskette's boot sector doesn't have much room, so the designers had to
be concise. They wanted to include at least one error code, and they did.
But then instead of some portion of the planet not understanding what
happened, very nearly the entire planet didn't understand what happened.
:-)

A better design would have used a global message like this:

OS/2 SYS01475: Diskette in Drive!

That's exactly the same number of characters, assuming the new line was
one character. (If not, the colon could have been omitted.) Yes, "Diskette
in Drive!" is technically English, but even so it would have been much
more broadly, globally understood than mystery error codes.

Even this one would have been better:

OS/2 SYS01475 Unbootable Diskette

Or:

SYS01475: Data Diskette in Drive!

Pretty much anything with the word "Diskette" (the term IBM preferred
instead of "Floppy") would have given users a clue. Even this:

OS/2 !! Sys01475
No Boot Diskette

- - - - - - - - - -
Timothy Sipples
I.T. Architect Executive
Digital Asset & Other Industry Solutions
IBM Z & LinuxONE
- - - - - - - - - -
E-Mail: sipp...@sg.ibm.com

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Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

When IBM started using pictures instead of text in their assembly instructions, 
I coinded the phrase "International icons: unintelligible in any language." The 
concept, of course, applies to software, not just to printed product assembly 
instruction, and indisputably not just IBM.

BTW, would it hurt when the product assembly involves bolts and screws to 
specify how much torque to apply?


--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3


From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of 
Charles Mills [charl...@mcn.org]
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2020 10:12 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

You have to understand national politics: "we won't buy this product; the
error messages are in English" [not French, Japanese, etc.]

Even though you are of course right, "diskette in drive" is more
understandable to the average French speaker than !! Sys01475

Charles

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
Behalf Of Timothy Sipples
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2020 1:42 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire
mainframes")

This pair of error messages was a design mistake:

OS/2 !! Sys01475
OS/2 !! Sys02027

That's a case of national language considerations run amok. That was the
only pair of messages you saw on your screen when you formatted a diskette
with OS/2, left the diskette in the primary drive, and rebooted the
typical PC of that era (that didn't automatically try to boot from another
device when there was a diskette in the primary drive).

A diskette's boot sector doesn't have much room, so the designers had to
be concise. They wanted to include at least one error code, and they did.
But then instead of some portion of the planet not understanding what
happened, very nearly the entire planet didn't understand what happened.
:-)

A better design would have used a global message like this:

OS/2 SYS01475: Diskette in Drive!

That's exactly the same number of characters, assuming the new line was
one character. (If not, the colon could have been omitted.) Yes, "Diskette
in Drive!" is technically English, but even so it would have been much
more broadly, globally understood than mystery error codes.

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Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

You have to understand national politics: "we won't buy this product; the
error messages are in English" [not French, Japanese, etc.]

Even though you are of course right, "diskette in drive" is more
understandable to the average French speaker than !! Sys01475

Charles

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
Behalf Of Timothy Sipples
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2020 1:42 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire
mainframes")

This pair of error messages was a design mistake:

OS/2 !! Sys01475
OS/2 !! Sys02027

That's a case of national language considerations run amok. That was the 
only pair of messages you saw on your screen when you formatted a diskette 
with OS/2, left the diskette in the primary drive, and rebooted the 
typical PC of that era (that didn't automatically try to boot from another 
device when there was a diskette in the primary drive).

A diskette's boot sector doesn't have much room, so the designers had to 
be concise. They wanted to include at least one error code, and they did. 
But then instead of some portion of the planet not understanding what 
happened, very nearly the entire planet didn't understand what happened. 
:-)

A better design would have used a global message like this:

OS/2 SYS01475: Diskette in Drive!

That's exactly the same number of characters, assuming the new line was 
one character. (If not, the colon could have been omitted.) Yes, "Diskette 
in Drive!" is technically English, but even so it would have been much 
more broadly, globally understood than mystery error codes.

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Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

2020-06-11 Thread Paul Gilmartin

On Thu, 11 Jun 2020 16:42:02 +0800, Timothy Sipples wrote:

>This pair of error messages was a design mistake:
>
>OS/2 !! Sys01475
>OS/2 !! Sys02027
>
>That's a case of national language considerations run amok. ...
>
>A diskette's boot sector doesn't have much room, ... 
>:-)
Please don't try to justify the inadequacy of z/OS messages
by analogy with limitations imposed by the OS/2 boot sector
size.

It's a non sequitur.

-- gil

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Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

2020-06-11 Thread Timothy Sipples

This pair of error messages was a design mistake:

OS/2 !! Sys01475
OS/2 !! Sys02027

That's a case of national language considerations run amok. That was the 
only pair of messages you saw on your screen when you formatted a diskette 
with OS/2, left the diskette in the primary drive, and rebooted the 
typical PC of that era (that didn't automatically try to boot from another 
device when there was a diskette in the primary drive).

A diskette's boot sector doesn't have much room, so the designers had to 
be concise. They wanted to include at least one error code, and they did. 
But then instead of some portion of the planet not understanding what 
happened, very nearly the entire planet didn't understand what happened. 
:-)

A better design would have used a global message like this:

OS/2 SYS01475: Diskette in Drive!

That's exactly the same number of characters, assuming the new line was 
one character. (If not, the colon could have been omitted.) Yes, "Diskette 
in Drive!" is technically English, but even so it would have been much 
more broadly, globally understood than mystery error codes.

Even this one would have been better:

OS/2 SYS01475 Unbootable Diskette

Or:

SYS01475: Data Diskette in Drive!

Pretty much anything with the word "Diskette" (the term IBM preferred 
instead of "Floppy") would have given users a clue. Even this:

OS/2 !! Sys01475
No Boot Diskette

- - - - - - - - - -
Timothy Sipples
I.T. Architect Executive
Digital Asset & Other Industry Solutions
IBM Z & LinuxONE
- - - - - - - - - -
E-Mail: sipp...@sg.ibm.com

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Re: [External] Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-10 Thread Tom Brennan

Things like numeric conversion and scooting text around are difficult in 
assembler, so I would tend to put that off until later [1].  Then one 
day I coded a macro and underlying subroutine so I could do something 
like this:


#PRINTF SYSPRINT,'DFS0929I BLDL ON DDNAME %s FAILED with RC=%d FOR 
MEMBER %s',(DDNAME,(R15),MEMBER)


... and suddenly I was far more likely to include the extra details with 
the initial coding.


I just looked at some doc for that old code and found this section, so I 
guess I was having some fun with various options to help display what I 
assume is correct English:


.*  PLURALIZER EXAMPLE (options P and A):
.*
.*  #SPRINTF OUTBUF,'You have %pd dogs',NUMDOGS
.*
.*   produces:  You have 1 dog
.*  You have 2 dogs
.*
.*  #SPRINTF OUTBUF,'There %ad dogs',NUMDOGS
.*
.*   produces:  There is 1 dog
.*  There are 2 dogs

[1] I was once known for the simple message "BAD RETURN CODE FROM COPY 
UTILITY", which I kept saying was temporary but somehow made it to a 
prod application.  Oops.


On 6/10/2020 1:25 PM, Seymour J Metz wrote:

I was here and that sort of message was not acceptable then. They could at 
least have written somethng like

 DFS0929I BLDL ON DDNAME foo FAILED with RC=bar FOR MEMBER --DDMPPSZ



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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

DAIRFAIL was available in the 1980s; I don't recall whether it was available in 
the late 1970s, and bitsavers doesn't have the manuals I would need to check.


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Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3


From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of Tom 
Brennan [t...@tombrennansoftware.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 3:55 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

I can't really remember, but I think it was when R15 was not zero maybe
S99ERROR/S99INFO were displayed in hex.  Seems like that was pretty
common at the time (1990's?) because I remember multiple times having to
go to the programming manual to find the SVC99 codes.  There were a few
(1708?) that I knew without having to look them up.

On 6/10/2020 10:39 AM, Seymour J Metz wrote:
> Are you talking about messages from dynamic allocation, or about messages 
> from the caller. The DAIRFAIL routine is avilable for formatting error codes 
> from DAIR and DYNALLOC, and DYNALLOC has an option to generate a message; if 
> an application doesn't use those facilities, but instead displays a raw error 
> and reason code, blame the application, not dynamic allocation.
>
> Oh, well, those facilities have only been around for a few decades, so maybe 
> they're too new. :-(
>
>
> --
> Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
> http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3
>
> 
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of 
> Tom Brennan [t...@tombrennansoftware.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 1:29 PM
> To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
> Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"
>
> Yep!  And I remember dynamic allocation errors where the user basically
> just gets the SVC99 return/reason code, and the only way to figure out
> what happened is to look it up in the programming manual - not even a
> message manual.
>
> So here's an example for you:  If the BLDL gets a non-zero return code,
> should the program show "MEMBER  NOT FOUND", which would
> probably be correct 99% of the time, or should we worry about the 1%
> where the message coded by the programmer was a good guess but still
> throws you off track?
>
> These cases actually show off the beauty of z/OS abends, in my opinion.
> If a macro/svc abends when it gets such a failure, the SVC99 or BLDL
> programmer doesn't have to code anything and we let IBM handle the error
> message, reason codes, and documentation.
>
> On 6/10/2020 10:02 AM, Frank Swarbrick wrote:
>> DFS0929I BLDL FAILED FOR MEMBER --DDMPPSZ
>>
>> This really means that the specified PSB DDMPPSZ is not in the specified IMS 
>> library.  Why can't it just say that?  As an application programmer do I 
>> really need to know that BLDL means, well, whatever it means?
>
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Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

> it's (presumably) accurate, and fairly precise. 

It leaves you gueesing whether it's complaining about a DBD or PSB library. The 
IDC3009I message is more precise, albeit not user friendly, and the 
documentation does tell you how to respond. But still, this is the 21st 
century; why do we still have 19th century error messages?

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3

From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of 
Steve Smith [sasd...@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 4:02 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

I take this example as merely an example.  IBM & the software industry are
notoriously bad at getting these right.

At one end, you have "Oops, something went wrong."  -- Windows 10 (and
yeah, the day I started using Windows 10).

At the other, IDC3009I.  Sheesh.

Counter to those, the IMS message doesn't seem quite so bad... it's
(presumably) accurate, and fairly precise.  You could argue it could be
worded more simply, or that it should provide the detailed codes.

In my experience, messages get very little attention or quality review.
I'm sure it varies a lot.

sas

On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 3:50 PM Paul Gilmartin <
000433f07816-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu> wrote:

> On Wed, 10 Jun 2020 17:02:40 +, Frank Swarbrick wrote:
>
> >Here's a quote from a message I posted to this list in 2009:
> >
> >"I have a very basic one to complain about:
> >
> >DFS0929I BLDL FAILED FOR MEMBER --DDMPPSZ
> >
> >This really means that the specified PSB DDMPPSZ is not in the specified
> IMS library.  Why can't it just say that?  As an application programmer do
> I really need to know that BLDL means, well, whatever it means?
> >
> The practice was established over a half century ago when every programmer
> could be presumed to have at least a superficial knowledge of the entire
> OS/360
> reference library.  And storage was too precious to support elaborate
> messages.
>
> That time has passed.
>
> The practice persists.
>
> -- gil
>
> --
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Re: [External] Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

I was here and that sort of message was not acceptable then. They could at 
least have written somethng like

DFS0929I BLDL ON DDNAME foo FAILED with RC=bar FOR MEMBER --DDMPPSZ

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3

From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of 
Pommier, Rex [rpomm...@sfgmembers.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 4:04 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: [External] Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List  On Behalf Of 
Paul Gilmartin
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 2:50 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: [External] Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

On Wed, 10 Jun 2020 17:02:40 +, Frank Swarbrick wrote:

>Here's a quote from a message I posted to this list in 2009:
>
>"I have a very basic one to complain about:
>
>DFS0929I BLDL FAILED FOR MEMBER --DDMPPSZ
>
>This really means that the specified PSB DDMPPSZ is not in the specified IMS 
>library.  Why can't it just say that?  As an application programmer do I 
>really need to know that BLDL means, well, whatever it means?
>
The practice was established over a half century ago when every programmer 
could be presumed to have at least a superficial knowledge of the entire OS/360 
reference library.  And storage was too precious to support elaborate messages.

That time has passed.

The practice persists.

-- gil

Not saying I wouldn't like to see the messages updated/cleaned up/friendly-ized 
( ? ) , but my guess is that the few people IBM has left working on z/OS and 
the related software have more important things to do.

Rex

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Re: [External] Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-10 Thread Pommier, Rex

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List  On Behalf Of 
Paul Gilmartin
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 2:50 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: [External] Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

On Wed, 10 Jun 2020 17:02:40 +, Frank Swarbrick wrote:

>Here's a quote from a message I posted to this list in 2009:
>
>"I have a very basic one to complain about:
>
>DFS0929I BLDL FAILED FOR MEMBER --DDMPPSZ
>
>This really means that the specified PSB DDMPPSZ is not in the specified IMS 
>library.  Why can't it just say that?  As an application programmer do I 
>really need to know that BLDL means, well, whatever it means?
> 
The practice was established over a half century ago when every programmer 
could be presumed to have at least a superficial knowledge of the entire OS/360 
reference library.  And storage was too precious to support elaborate messages.

That time has passed.

The practice persists.

-- gil

Not saying I wouldn't like to see the messages updated/cleaned up/friendly-ized 
( ? ) , but my guess is that the few people IBM has left working on z/OS and 
the related software have more important things to do.

Rex

The information contained in this message is confidential, protected from 
disclosure and may be legally privileged.  If the reader of this message is not 
the intended recipient or an employee or agent responsible for delivering this 
message to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any disclosure, 
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is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful.  If you have received this 
communication in error, please notify us immediately by replying to this 
message and destroy the material in its entirety, whether in electronic or hard 
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Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

2020-06-10 Thread Steve Smith

I take this example as merely an example.  IBM & the software industry are
notoriously bad at getting these right.

At one end, you have "Oops, something went wrong."  -- Windows 10 (and
yeah, the day I started using Windows 10).

At the other, IDC3009I.  Sheesh.

Counter to those, the IMS message doesn't seem quite so bad... it's
(presumably) accurate, and fairly precise.  You could argue it could be
worded more simply, or that it should provide the detailed codes.

In my experience, messages get very little attention or quality review.
I'm sure it varies a lot.

sas

On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 3:50 PM Paul Gilmartin <
000433f07816-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu> wrote:

> On Wed, 10 Jun 2020 17:02:40 +, Frank Swarbrick wrote:
>
> >Here's a quote from a message I posted to this list in 2009:
> >
> >"I have a very basic one to complain about:
> >
> >DFS0929I BLDL FAILED FOR MEMBER --DDMPPSZ
> >
> >This really means that the specified PSB DDMPPSZ is not in the specified
> IMS library.  Why can't it just say that?  As an application programmer do
> I really need to know that BLDL means, well, whatever it means?
> >
> The practice was established over a half century ago when every programmer
> could be presumed to have at least a superficial knowledge of the entire
> OS/360
> reference library.  And storage was too precious to support elaborate
> messages.
>
> That time has passed.
>
> The practice persists.
>
> -- gil
>
> --
> For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
> send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
>

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-10 Thread Tom Brennan

I can't really remember, but I think it was when R15 was not zero maybe 
S99ERROR/S99INFO were displayed in hex.  Seems like that was pretty 
common at the time (1990's?) because I remember multiple times having to 
go to the programming manual to find the SVC99 codes.  There were a few 
(1708?) that I knew without having to look them up.


On 6/10/2020 10:39 AM, Seymour J Metz wrote:

Are you talking about messages from dynamic allocation, or about messages from 
the caller. The DAIRFAIL routine is avilable for formatting error codes from 
DAIR and DYNALLOC, and DYNALLOC has an option to generate a message; if an 
application doesn't use those facilities, but instead displays a raw error and 
reason code, blame the application, not dynamic allocation.

Oh, well, those facilities have only been around for a few decades, so maybe 
they're too new. :-(


--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3


From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of Tom 
Brennan [t...@tombrennansoftware.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 1:29 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

Yep!  And I remember dynamic allocation errors where the user basically
just gets the SVC99 return/reason code, and the only way to figure out
what happened is to look it up in the programming manual - not even a
message manual.

So here's an example for you:  If the BLDL gets a non-zero return code,
should the program show "MEMBER  NOT FOUND", which would
probably be correct 99% of the time, or should we worry about the 1%
where the message coded by the programmer was a good guess but still
throws you off track?

These cases actually show off the beauty of z/OS abends, in my opinion.
If a macro/svc abends when it gets such a failure, the SVC99 or BLDL
programmer doesn't have to code anything and we let IBM handle the error
message, reason codes, and documentation.

On 6/10/2020 10:02 AM, Frank Swarbrick wrote:

DFS0929I BLDL FAILED FOR MEMBER --DDMPPSZ

This really means that the specified PSB DDMPPSZ is not in the specified IMS 
library.  Why can't it just say that?  As an application programmer do I really 
need to know that BLDL means, well, whatever it means?


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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-10 Thread Paul Gilmartin

On Wed, 10 Jun 2020 17:02:40 +, Frank Swarbrick wrote:

>Here's a quote from a message I posted to this list in 2009:
>
>"I have a very basic one to complain about:
>
>DFS0929I BLDL FAILED FOR MEMBER --DDMPPSZ
>
>This really means that the specified PSB DDMPPSZ is not in the specified IMS 
>library.  Why can't it just say that?  As an application programmer do I 
>really need to know that BLDL means, well, whatever it means?
> 
The practice was established over a half century ago when every programmer
could be presumed to have at least a superficial knowledge of the entire OS/360
reference library.  And storage was too precious to support elaborate messages.

That time has passed.

The practice persists.

-- gil

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

"Après moi le déluge."


--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3


From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of 
Bill Johnson [0047540adefe-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 1:45 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

I worked for a company whose management only knew initial cost. So they would 
always buy the less expensive product. Eventually they’d wind up spending more 
after additional costs to implement the less expensive software or hardware.

Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone


On Wednesday, June 10, 2020, 12:11 PM, Seymour J Metz  wrote:

> The real problem is nothing to do with technology, and all to do with cost.

The actual cost, the creative accounting cost or the cost promised by the 
salesman? How often is there an honest evaluation of the costs for various 
options, including downstream costs and benefits?


--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3


From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of 
Mike Cairns [m...@mikecairns.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 10:57 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

Is no-one aware of Master the Mainframe competition for students?  
https://secure-web.cisco.com/1xW1S4133tFblLxTT6mEtsV0KVTiWfQUsHsD2J-AueeybtB5mAkg7WOhMuaUpkBTmOVfAV4rsloDvt8Fwvm5nIWqUrzWy26pX9SXCWZfOPHOoP5KpYMAfDjGEZLaej658t9DxHBrDNFxHQogsanzKiVC7f5Vqh4buo5fGQsWH-0rsRJ_QVRoUGtjsQiKY-qPYRNjh_fyoinGN45S0FsYw9IFR1FUSSd6r_GHE-d53AWdOuuLYI4gRxGIWDgKxATnUCM6mpl1LHBRBVIVLhWs6AXbyKLSTUnchjPUCETzdXoXjdUhtawbzJ34e9OyXlD_u3w9W5AYYxm_IU4oTMxIRMShS_aNp1-HdnIvFWIc3iwsbwp2SZVqO9jZnwpmnxTiJCVZ0ksiM6spAOJ6D5Vdtk_5y_3QMYlxOc3EZeQ1xIh2W6UM4HjWpbkERcvkfhrTm/https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FMaster_the_Mainframe_Contest

And the Academic Initiative, under which the classes mentioned by Wayne are run 
(Wayne and I worked on these together back in the day):  
https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/z/education

These have been running for more than a decade now and provide a completely 
cost free access for students to mainframes.  In the case of the MtM contest, 
you don't even really need to be enrolled in an IT related course at a fee 
paying institute - my 18 year old son can now write COBOL, JCL and REXX after 
completing last years contest.

And in respect of the OP, the 'modernisation' moniker - disclaimer, I also 
currently work for one of those mainframe modernisation companies.  Yes, they 
do mean replacing your mainframe with x86, and generally they also focus on the 
C word - Cloud and in many cases some kind of language transposition, i.e. 
COBOL to Java.  Interestingly my employer also sponsored a survey, and while we 
didn't get the hyped 100% 'want off the platform' result, it does seem there 
are significant pressures within many companies to see the mainframe replaced 
or at the very least drastically reduced in cost.  The real problem is nothing 
to do with technology, and all to do with cost.  While a single vendor owns the 
hardware and software stack (think Apple), they can charge whatever they want 
regardless of the value.

There are several technological approaches to the replacement push, some are 
smarter than others.  Like most things in IT, it comes down to factors such as 
time and money more than technology.

Cheers - Mike

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

The problem with that message is not that it mentions BLDL, but that it fails 
to mention other relevant data. At a minimum, what was the ddname and what was 
the return code. Ideally I'd like secondary messages listing the libraries in 
the concatenation.

A user ABEND without a message is hard to justify. Are you sure that it wasn't 
in the joblog?

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3

From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of 
Frank Swarbrick [frank.swarbr...@outlook.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 1:02 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

Here's a quote from a message I posted to this list in 2009:

"I have a very basic one to complain about:

DFS0929I BLDL FAILED FOR MEMBER --DDMPPSZ

This really means that the specified PSB DDMPPSZ is not in the specified IMS 
library.  Why can't it just say that?  As an application programmer do I really 
need to know that BLDL means, well, whatever it means?

Of course IMS has some that are even worse.  Sometimes I just get something 
like:
USER COMPLETION CODE=
without any message at all.  The first time I ran in to it it took me a heck of 
a time to figure out I need to look in the IMS manual to find out what the 
error was.  For all I could tell it was a user application error, but I 
couldn't see what.  Now all of the other developers on our VSE to z/OS 
conversion team just ask me what the errors are, because trying to find them in 
the manuals is too often too painful.  Hopefully I'll get them trained some day!

I've got to say, coming from VSE their error messages are, in general, much 
better.  Of course as a developer I hate dealing with creating error messages 
for my own apps, so I can understand why IBM has such issues...  :-)"

Things have not improved much, if it all, in this regard in the last ten years. 
 

From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List  on behalf of 
Mike Schwab 
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 8:42 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU 
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

Yep.  We used to get a lot of errors for out of volumes in a storage
groups, and the users would want us to add more volumes.  For several
calls I would point out that the data set had a very small primary and
secondary space value.  I would go through all the extents on one
volume, then proceed through the rest, and run out volumes despite
lots of space in the storage group.  They didn't want to reallocate,
so I suggested they migrate and recall the dataset.  Then the existing
space would be in 1 extent on 1 volume and plenty of extents and
volumes to extend onto.  The problem started going away after that.

Would the new 1st extent on the first volume from the recall become
the default 1st allocation on subsequent volumes?

On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 12:48 AM Seymour J Metz  wrote:
>
> My pet peeve is the default for SPACE; "Absolute track not available" is not 
> a user friendly error message for forgetting to specify SPACE.
>
>
> --
> Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
> http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3
>
> 
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of 
> Bob Bridges [robhbrid...@gmail.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 8:33 PM
> To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
> Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"
>
> JCL: I used to complain about JCL's arcane and in some cases backward syntax. 
>  I mean, "COND=(0,LT,step.procstep)" - who made that up?  But somehow over 
> the years I've made my peace with JCL.  It is what it is.  And I would have 
> done no better, back then.
>
> EBCDIC: A couple of years ago, when I was employed by a small mainframe 
> security consulting company, a client came to them asking for help with a 
> project to create a security product that would reside on a distributed 
> platform but handle security on the mainframe.  They were going to develop it 
> for a client that was using Top Secret, but it could have been any of the 
> three.  These folks didn't know mainframes, which is why they hired my 
> employers, who assigned me to the project.
>
> I said they "didn't know mainframes"; let's start with the fact that they 
> didn't know about EBCDIC.  But that's no problem, right?  There are lots of 
> things one can do to translate between EBCDIC and ASCII.  In the process of 
> working on this project I wrote, my very own self, a socket server that would 
> handle both ASCII and EBCDIC clients.  (I mention this because I'd never done 
> any such thing before, and I was inordinately pleased with the fact that I 
> could do anything so cool.  Those of you who've done hundreds of those and 
> take it for granted, ple

Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-10 Thread Bill Johnson

I worked for a company whose management only knew initial cost. So they would 
always buy the less expensive product. Eventually they’d wind up spending more 
after additional costs to implement the less expensive software or hardware.

Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone


On Wednesday, June 10, 2020, 12:11 PM, Seymour J Metz  wrote:

> The real problem is nothing to do with technology, and all to do with cost.  

The actual cost, the creative accounting cost or the cost promised by the 
salesman? How often is there an honest evaluation of the costs for various 
options, including downstream costs and benefits? 


--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3


From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of 
Mike Cairns [m...@mikecairns.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 10:57 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

Is no-one aware of Master the Mainframe competition for students?  
https://secure-web.cisco.com/1xW1S4133tFblLxTT6mEtsV0KVTiWfQUsHsD2J-AueeybtB5mAkg7WOhMuaUpkBTmOVfAV4rsloDvt8Fwvm5nIWqUrzWy26pX9SXCWZfOPHOoP5KpYMAfDjGEZLaej658t9DxHBrDNFxHQogsanzKiVC7f5Vqh4buo5fGQsWH-0rsRJ_QVRoUGtjsQiKY-qPYRNjh_fyoinGN45S0FsYw9IFR1FUSSd6r_GHE-d53AWdOuuLYI4gRxGIWDgKxATnUCM6mpl1LHBRBVIVLhWs6AXbyKLSTUnchjPUCETzdXoXjdUhtawbzJ34e9OyXlD_u3w9W5AYYxm_IU4oTMxIRMShS_aNp1-HdnIvFWIc3iwsbwp2SZVqO9jZnwpmnxTiJCVZ0ksiM6spAOJ6D5Vdtk_5y_3QMYlxOc3EZeQ1xIh2W6UM4HjWpbkERcvkfhrTm/https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FMaster_the_Mainframe_Contest

And the Academic Initiative, under which the classes mentioned by Wayne are run 
(Wayne and I worked on these together back in the day):  
https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/z/education

These have been running for more than a decade now and provide a completely 
cost free access for students to mainframes.  In the case of the MtM contest, 
you don't even really need to be enrolled in an IT related course at a fee 
paying institute - my 18 year old son can now write COBOL, JCL and REXX after 
completing last years contest.

And in respect of the OP, the 'modernisation' moniker - disclaimer, I also 
currently work for one of those mainframe modernisation companies.  Yes, they 
do mean replacing your mainframe with x86, and generally they also focus on the 
C word - Cloud and in many cases some kind of language transposition, i.e. 
COBOL to Java.  Interestingly my employer also sponsored a survey, and while we 
didn't get the hyped 100% 'want off the platform' result, it does seem there 
are significant pressures within many companies to see the mainframe replaced 
or at the very least drastically reduced in cost.  The real problem is nothing 
to do with technology, and all to do with cost.  While a single vendor owns the 
hardware and software stack (think Apple), they can charge whatever they want 
regardless of the value.

There are several technological approaches to the replacement push, some are 
smarter than others.  Like most things in IT, it comes down to factors such as 
time and money more than technology.

Cheers - Mike

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

Are you talking about messages from dynamic allocation, or about messages from 
the caller. The DAIRFAIL routine is avilable for formatting error codes from 
DAIR and DYNALLOC, and DYNALLOC has an option to generate a message; if an 
application doesn't use those facilities, but instead displays a raw error and 
reason code, blame the application, not dynamic allocation.

Oh, well, those facilities have only been around for a few decades, so maybe 
they're too new. :-(

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3

From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of Tom 
Brennan [t...@tombrennansoftware.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 1:29 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

Yep!  And I remember dynamic allocation errors where the user basically
just gets the SVC99 return/reason code, and the only way to figure out
what happened is to look it up in the programming manual - not even a
message manual.

So here's an example for you:  If the BLDL gets a non-zero return code,
should the program show "MEMBER  NOT FOUND", which would
probably be correct 99% of the time, or should we worry about the 1%
where the message coded by the programmer was a good guess but still
throws you off track?

These cases actually show off the beauty of z/OS abends, in my opinion.
If a macro/svc abends when it gets such a failure, the SVC99 or BLDL
programmer doesn't have to code anything and we let IBM handle the error
message, reason codes, and documentation.

On 6/10/2020 10:02 AM, Frank Swarbrick wrote:
> DFS0929I BLDL FAILED FOR MEMBER --DDMPPSZ
>
> This really means that the specified PSB DDMPPSZ is not in the specified IMS 
> library.  Why can't it just say that?  As an application programmer do I 
> really need to know that BLDL means, well, whatever it means?

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-10 Thread Tom Brennan

Yep!  And I remember dynamic allocation errors where the user basically 
just gets the SVC99 return/reason code, and the only way to figure out 
what happened is to look it up in the programming manual - not even a 
message manual.


So here's an example for you:  If the BLDL gets a non-zero return code, 
should the program show "MEMBER  NOT FOUND", which would 
probably be correct 99% of the time, or should we worry about the 1% 
where the message coded by the programmer was a good guess but still 
throws you off track?


These cases actually show off the beauty of z/OS abends, in my opinion. 
If a macro/svc abends when it gets such a failure, the SVC99 or BLDL 
programmer doesn't have to code anything and we let IBM handle the error 
message, reason codes, and documentation.


On 6/10/2020 10:02 AM, Frank Swarbrick wrote:

DFS0929I BLDL FAILED FOR MEMBER --DDMPPSZ

This really means that the specified PSB DDMPPSZ is not in the specified IMS 
library.  Why can't it just say that?  As an application programmer do I really 
need to know that BLDL means, well, whatever it means?


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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-10 Thread Frank Swarbrick

Here's a quote from a message I posted to this list in 2009:

"I have a very basic one to complain about:

DFS0929I BLDL FAILED FOR MEMBER --DDMPPSZ

This really means that the specified PSB DDMPPSZ is not in the specified IMS 
library.  Why can't it just say that?  As an application programmer do I really 
need to know that BLDL means, well, whatever it means?

Of course IMS has some that are even worse.  Sometimes I just get something 
like:
USER COMPLETION CODE=
without any message at all.  The first time I ran in to it it took me a heck of 
a time to figure out I need to look in the IMS manual to find out what the 
error was.  For all I could tell it was a user application error, but I 
couldn't see what.  Now all of the other developers on our VSE to z/OS 
conversion team just ask me what the errors are, because trying to find them in 
the manuals is too often too painful.  Hopefully I'll get them trained some day!

I've got to say, coming from VSE their error messages are, in general, much 
better.  Of course as a developer I hate dealing with creating error messages 
for my own apps, so I can understand why IBM has such issues...  :-)"

Things have not improved much, if it all, in this regard in the last ten years. 
 

From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List  on behalf of 
Mike Schwab 
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 8:42 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU 
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

Yep.  We used to get a lot of errors for out of volumes in a storage
groups, and the users would want us to add more volumes.  For several
calls I would point out that the data set had a very small primary and
secondary space value.  I would go through all the extents on one
volume, then proceed through the rest, and run out volumes despite
lots of space in the storage group.  They didn't want to reallocate,
so I suggested they migrate and recall the dataset.  Then the existing
space would be in 1 extent on 1 volume and plenty of extents and
volumes to extend onto.  The problem started going away after that.

Would the new 1st extent on the first volume from the recall become
the default 1st allocation on subsequent volumes?

On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 12:48 AM Seymour J Metz  wrote:
>
> My pet peeve is the default for SPACE; "Absolute track not available" is not 
> a user friendly error message for forgetting to specify SPACE.
>
>
> --
> Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
> http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3
>
> 
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of 
> Bob Bridges [robhbrid...@gmail.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 8:33 PM
> To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
> Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"
>
> JCL: I used to complain about JCL's arcane and in some cases backward syntax. 
>  I mean, "COND=(0,LT,step.procstep)" - who made that up?  But somehow over 
> the years I've made my peace with JCL.  It is what it is.  And I would have 
> done no better, back then.
>
> EBCDIC: A couple of years ago, when I was employed by a small mainframe 
> security consulting company, a client came to them asking for help with a 
> project to create a security product that would reside on a distributed 
> platform but handle security on the mainframe.  They were going to develop it 
> for a client that was using Top Secret, but it could have been any of the 
> three.  These folks didn't know mainframes, which is why they hired my 
> employers, who assigned me to the project.
>
> I said they "didn't know mainframes"; let's start with the fact that they 
> didn't know about EBCDIC.  But that's no problem, right?  There are lots of 
> things one can do to translate between EBCDIC and ASCII.  In the process of 
> working on this project I wrote, my very own self, a socket server that would 
> handle both ASCII and EBCDIC clients.  (I mention this because I'd never done 
> any such thing before, and I was inordinately pleased with the fact that I 
> could do anything so cool.  Those of you who've done hundreds of those and 
> take it for granted, please don't burst my bubble.)
>
> Then they discovered the whole issue of 3270 emulation.  And I probably 
> wasn't helping by trying to explain the complexities of mainframe security at 
> about the same time.  The client went away to think about the communications 
> issue, and somehow they never came back; the project never went anywhere 
> after that.
>
> ---
> Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313
>
> /* Always look a gift horse in the mouth.  It may have hoof-and-mouth 
> disease.  -Bob Bridges, 1977 */
>
> -Original Message-
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-

Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

Essentially, a zero sum gave is one in which there is a fixed amount of money, 
so any gain must be at the other players' expense and there are no "win-win" 
strategies. Open software development is not like that. The big players are 
large corporations that support it becaause doing so increases their downstream 
profitability.

As an example, whenever I got a program from, e.g., the CBT tape, and enhanced 
it, I didn't keep the enhancement as the private version of my installation, 
but sent it back to the author. In those cases where the author chose to 
include it in his version, I had less of a support burden, e.g., refitting my 
changes into newer versions.

There is also the issue of support. When a company has staff familiar with the 
open source code, they are in a better position to sell support services. They 
win, the open source community wins and their customers win.

If IBM invests billions in open source software, I have no issue with them 
earning it back selling services; in fact, I am glad of it. Whom does that harm?

"I won't bail; the hole is in your end of the boat."


--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3


From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of Bob 
Bridges [robhbrid...@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 11:55 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

Not sure what you mean.  I ~think~ I agree (unless I misunderstood you) -
but software development still costs time and effort, and no matter who the
developer is he has to eat.  If he chooses to give away some of his work,
that's fine and I accept gratefully; but it means he's earning enough
elsewhere that he can afford to give away part of his time.  So even in this
case, "free" means "paid for by someone else".

But yeah, there are some people who don't insist on getting it back one way
or another, at least part of the time.

---
Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313

/* Nothing is as bad as it seems; nothing is as good as it seems.  -a
farmer's saying */

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
Behalf Of Seymour J Metz
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 07:27

Software development is not a zero sum game.


From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of
Bob Bridges [robhbrid...@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 12:53 AM

/* Most people thought [in 2000] that Web content should somehow be “free,”
a hopelessly naïve ideology known today as “dot-communism.”...Dot-communism
has been discarded along with its political counterpart, as users find that
the adjective “free” means, as it always does, “paid for by someone else,”
who insists on getting it back one way or another.  -David S Platt,
"Introducing Microsoft .NET, Third Edition", 2003 */

-Original Message-
From: Seymour J Metz
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 20:16

I wish. GMU is using proprietary e-mail software and no longer allows access
via POP3 or IMAP4.


From: Farley, Peter x23353 [peter.far...@broadridge.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 5:53 PM

Add to that the open-source mindset that software SHOULD BY RIGHT be "free"
and you have a tough market to break into (again) from a for-profit company
perspective.

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

> The real problem is nothing to do with technology, and all to do with cost.  

The actual cost, the creative accounting cost or the cost promised by the 
salesman? How often is there an honest evaluation of the costs for various 
options, including downstream costs and benefits? 


--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3


From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of 
Mike Cairns [m...@mikecairns.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 10:57 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

Is no-one aware of Master the Mainframe competition for students?  
https://secure-web.cisco.com/1xW1S4133tFblLxTT6mEtsV0KVTiWfQUsHsD2J-AueeybtB5mAkg7WOhMuaUpkBTmOVfAV4rsloDvt8Fwvm5nIWqUrzWy26pX9SXCWZfOPHOoP5KpYMAfDjGEZLaej658t9DxHBrDNFxHQogsanzKiVC7f5Vqh4buo5fGQsWH-0rsRJ_QVRoUGtjsQiKY-qPYRNjh_fyoinGN45S0FsYw9IFR1FUSSd6r_GHE-d53AWdOuuLYI4gRxGIWDgKxATnUCM6mpl1LHBRBVIVLhWs6AXbyKLSTUnchjPUCETzdXoXjdUhtawbzJ34e9OyXlD_u3w9W5AYYxm_IU4oTMxIRMShS_aNp1-HdnIvFWIc3iwsbwp2SZVqO9jZnwpmnxTiJCVZ0ksiM6spAOJ6D5Vdtk_5y_3QMYlxOc3EZeQ1xIh2W6UM4HjWpbkERcvkfhrTm/https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FMaster_the_Mainframe_Contest

And the Academic Initiative, under which the classes mentioned by Wayne are run 
(Wayne and I worked on these together back in the day):  
https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/z/education

These have been running for more than a decade now and provide a completely 
cost free access for students to mainframes.  In the case of the MtM contest, 
you don't even really need to be enrolled in an IT related course at a fee 
paying institute - my 18 year old son can now write COBOL, JCL and REXX after 
completing last years contest.

And in respect of the OP, the 'modernisation' moniker - disclaimer, I also 
currently work for one of those mainframe modernisation companies.  Yes, they 
do mean replacing your mainframe with x86, and generally they also focus on the 
C word - Cloud and in many cases some kind of language transposition, i.e. 
COBOL to Java.  Interestingly my employer also sponsored a survey, and while we 
didn't get the hyped 100% 'want off the platform' result, it does seem there 
are significant pressures within many companies to see the mainframe replaced 
or at the very least drastically reduced in cost.  The real problem is nothing 
to do with technology, and all to do with cost.  While a single vendor owns the 
hardware and software stack (think Apple), they can charge whatever they want 
regardless of the value.

There are several technological approaches to the replacement push, some are 
smarter than others.  Like most things in IT, it comes down to factors such as 
time and money more than technology.

Cheers - Mike

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-10 Thread Bob Bridges

I thought about that.  But for some reason I kind of like it in its present 
form; it has a certain slapdash irreverence.  We'll see whether I still feel 
that way in a few months.

---
Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313

/* A child's greatest source of security today is not only knowing 'my mom 
loves me' and 'my dad loves me,' but also that Mom and Dad love each other.  If 
we are serious about renewing fatherhood, we must be serious about renewing 
marriage.  -George W Bush, 2001 */

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of Joel C. Ewing
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 08:47

Would be more clearly stated with either "journalism" -> "journalists" ,
or alternatively with "one" -> "a journalist"  -- unless the whole
intent is to use poetic license to cause initial puzzlement followed by
"oh, that's what was meant".

--- On 6/9/20 11:55 PM, Bob Bridges wrote:
> LOL - you may just have made my tagline file, Bill.  We'll see whether I 
> still like it well enough tomorrow.  Like this:
>
> /* The problem with journalism today is everyone thinks they are one  
> -Bill Johnson in the listserv IBM-MAIN */
>
> -Original Message-
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On 
> Behalf Of Bill Johnson
> Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 20:20
>
> I sent the author of this hit piece a few real journalistic pieces which 
> contradicted her claims. She responded kindly and stated she would do more 
> research (or any research in my opinion) if she did another mainframe piece. 
> The problem with journalism today is everyone thinks they are one, and sites 
> like tech republic are only interested in clicks & eyeballs to monetize the 
> material.

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-10 Thread Bob Bridges

Not sure what you mean.  I ~think~ I agree (unless I misunderstood you) -
but software development still costs time and effort, and no matter who the
developer is he has to eat.  If he chooses to give away some of his work,
that's fine and I accept gratefully; but it means he's earning enough
elsewhere that he can afford to give away part of his time.  So even in this
case, "free" means "paid for by someone else".

But yeah, there are some people who don't insist on getting it back one way
or another, at least part of the time.

---
Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313

/* Nothing is as bad as it seems; nothing is as good as it seems.  -a
farmer's saying */

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
Behalf Of Seymour J Metz
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 07:27

Software development is not a zero sum game.


From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of
Bob Bridges [robhbrid...@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 12:53 AM

/* Most people thought [in 2000] that Web content should somehow be free,
a hopelessly naïve ideology known today as dot-communism....Dot-communism
has been discarded along with its political counterpart, as users find that
the adjective free means, as it always does, paid for by someone else,
who insists on getting it back one way or another.  -David S Platt,
"Introducing Microsoft .NET, Third Edition", 2003 */

-Original Message-
From: Seymour J Metz
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 20:16

I wish. GMU is using proprietary e-mail software and no longer allows access
via POP3 or IMAP4.


From: Farley, Peter x23353 [peter.far...@broadridge.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 5:53 PM

Add to that the open-source mindset that software SHOULD BY RIGHT be "free"
and you have a tough market to break into (again) from a for-profit company
perspective.

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-10 Thread Mike Cairns

Is no-one aware of Master the Mainframe competition for students?  
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_the_Mainframe_Contest

And the Academic Initiative, under which the classes mentioned by Wayne are run 
(Wayne and I worked on these together back in the day):  
https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/z/education

These have been running for more than a decade now and provide a completely 
cost free access for students to mainframes.  In the case of the MtM contest, 
you don't even really need to be enrolled in an IT related course at a fee 
paying institute - my 18 year old son can now write COBOL, JCL and REXX after 
completing last years contest.

And in respect of the OP, the 'modernisation' moniker - disclaimer, I also 
currently work for one of those mainframe modernisation companies.  Yes, they 
do mean replacing your mainframe with x86, and generally they also focus on the 
C word - Cloud and in many cases some kind of language transposition, i.e. 
COBOL to Java.  Interestingly my employer also sponsored a survey, and while we 
didn't get the hyped 100% 'want off the platform' result, it does seem there 
are significant pressures within many companies to see the mainframe replaced 
or at the very least drastically reduced in cost.  The real problem is nothing 
to do with technology, and all to do with cost.  While a single vendor owns the 
hardware and software stack (think Apple), they can charge whatever they want 
regardless of the value.

There are several technological approaches to the replacement push, some are 
smarter than others.  Like most things in IT, it comes down to factors such as 
time and money more than technology.

Cheers - Mike

--
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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

I wish.


--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3


From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of 
Bill Johnson [0047540adefe-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 10:43 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

Or, you could just know that journalism is made up of journalists.


Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone


On Wednesday, June 10, 2020, 10:22 AM, Joel C. Ewing  wrote:

Would be more clearly stated with either "journalism" -> "journalists" ,
or alternatively with "one" -> "a journalist"  -- unless the whole
intent is to use poetic license to cause initial puzzlement followed by
"oh, that's what was meant".
JC  Ewing

On 6/9/20 11:55 PM, Bob Bridges wrote:
> LOL - you may just have made my tagline file, Bill.  We'll see whether I 
> still like it well enough tomorrow.  Like this:
>
> ---
> Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313
>
> The problem with journalism today is everyone thinks they are one  -Bill 
> Johnson in the listserv IBM-MAIN
>
> -Original Message-
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On 
> Behalf Of Bill Johnson
> Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 20:20
>
> I sent the author of this hit piece a few real journalistic pieces which 
> contradicted her claims. She responded kindly and stated she would do more 
> research (or any research in my opinion) if she did another mainframe piece. 
> The problem with journalism today is everyone thinks they are one, and sites 
> like tech republic are only interested in clicks & eyeballs to monetize the 
> material.
>
> ...


--
Joel C. Ewing

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-10 Thread Bill Johnson

Or, you could just know that journalism is made up of journalists.


Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone


On Wednesday, June 10, 2020, 10:22 AM, Joel C. Ewing  wrote:

Would be more clearly stated with either "journalism" -> "journalists" ,
or alternatively with "one" -> "a journalist"  -- unless the whole
intent is to use poetic license to cause initial puzzlement followed by
"oh, that's what was meant".
    JC  Ewing

On 6/9/20 11:55 PM, Bob Bridges wrote:
> LOL - you may just have made my tagline file, Bill.  We'll see whether I 
> still like it well enough tomorrow.  Like this:
>
> ---
> Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313
>
> The problem with journalism today is everyone thinks they are one  -Bill 
> Johnson in the listserv IBM-MAIN
>
> -Original Message-
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On 
> Behalf Of Bill Johnson
> Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 20:20
>
> I sent the author of this hit piece a few real journalistic pieces which 
> contradicted her claims. She responded kindly and stated she would do more 
> research (or any research in my opinion) if she did another mainframe piece. 
> The problem with journalism today is everyone thinks they are one, and sites 
> like tech republic are only interested in clicks & eyeballs to monetize the 
> material.
>
> ...


-- 
Joel C. Ewing

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-10 Thread Carmen Vitullo

:) 
this reminds me of another Fortune 500 aerospace company i worked for, the new 
engineering director didn't want to spend the funds to upgrade the CADCAM 
3090-400 to a 3090-600 . 
he decided to move the application to a pool of RS/6000's for the application 
and data, a new ATM network definition and an RS/6000 on every desktop for the 
engineers, that solution performed so badly we found most engineers would 
attempt to login to the RS/6000 wait a couple minutes then log back on to the 
mainframe system. another issue was software updates, at the time very time 
consuming, by the time the last desktop RS/6000 was upgraded it as time to 
start over again, kinda like the guys who paint the golden gate bridge, once 
you're done, time to start at the beginning ") 


Carmen Vitullo 

- Original Message -

From: "Jonathan Quay"  
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU 
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 9:08:41 AM 
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes" 

My Fortune 500 employer got off their mainframes by using SaaS vendors for most 
of the big BICARSA applications that ran on their mainframes. What back end 
those SaaS vendors use is anybody's guess. They also decided in the case of 
some applications that they would move to Intel hardware based solutions 
running Windows or Linux. They eventually had to state "we don't care about 
data integrity". Sure enough it was not long after that I got a marketing 
letter that said "Thanks for being a loyal customer since 1900." 

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-10 Thread Jonathan Quay

My Fortune 500 employer got off their mainframes by using SaaS vendors for most 
of the big BICARSA applications that ran on their mainframes.  What back end 
those SaaS vendors use is anybody's guess.  They also decided in the case of 
some applications that they would move to Intel hardware based solutions 
running Windows or Linux.  They eventually had to state "we don't care about 
data integrity".  Sure enough it was not long after that I got a marketing 
letter that said "Thanks for being a loyal customer since 1900."

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Re: [External] Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-10 Thread R.S.


AFAIK IBM sometimes give some software to universities for free.
It can be operating system, access to remote system or just IBM course 
(also include access to mainframe in Poughkeepsie).
To complement: several years ago they sold BC class machine to some 
polish university at very good price. The HDS decided to sell DASD array 
for 1 PLN (approx 0.25 USD).


--
Radoslaw Skorupka
Lodz, Poland







W dniu 09.06.2020 o 18:12, Pommier, Rex pisze:

Years ago, IBM did sell hardware/software to universities at deeply discounted 
prices to attract young people to them.  Why they stopped is anybody's guess.

Rex

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List  On Behalf Of Tom 
Brennan
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 10:54 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: [External] Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

When I bought my Yamaha piano in 1989, I heard a story that Yamaha had been 
supplying free pianos to universities for years.  It was more than them just 
being nice, they knew that someone practicing every day on the school grand 
piano would likely go on to buy one, or be the decision maker for an orchestra, 
night club, or whatever.  I always thought that was super smart of them.  What 
I always thought was rather dumb, is that IBM doesn't do similar with 
educational use of all their software.  And that's just copied bits ... no 
wood, metal, delivery, tuning, etc.

On 6/9/2020 5:02 AM, Bob Bridges wrote:

A coworker just sent me this brief article.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/everyone-wants-to-retire-mainfram
es-but-74-of-modernization-efforts-fail/

I'm interested in two aspects of this:

1) The writer uses the word "modernization" quite a bit, and as far as I can tell she 
uses it, without explanation, to mean "switching from mainframes to more recently invented 
platforms".  This is the old assumption we've talked about recently.

2) There's a really surprising number in there:

"...almost 100% of survey respondents plan to move legacy applications to the 
cloud this year and the motivation to move is clear:

- 60% strongly agree they will be left behind competitively if they
fail to modernize
- 33% say modernizing has allowed the company to be more reactive to
market changes
- 34% say legacy modernization has accelerated digital transformation
projects

About three-quarters of leaders said they have started a modernization program but 
failed to complete it"

Can that "almost 100%" claim be true?  I confess that three out of my last three clients 
are talking about eliminating the mainframe, but I supposed it to be an anomaly.  Maybe the survey 
used the word "modernize" and the author ~assumed~ this must mean dropping the mainframe.

The article also says "Mainframes are still critical to business operations with 71% 
of the Fortune 500 depending on these machines, including 92 of the world's 100 largest 
banks".  Come on - she's telling us that almost ~all~ of those companies intend to 
switch legacy applications to the cloud?  I just can't buy that.  ~My~ bank had certainly 
better not be planning such a move.

---
Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313

/* If a problem has a single neck, it has a simple solution. */

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-10 Thread Joel C. Ewing

Would be more clearly stated with either "journalism" -> "journalists" ,
or alternatively with "one" -> "a journalist"  -- unless the whole
intent is to use poetic license to cause initial puzzlement followed by
"oh, that's what was meant".
    JC  Ewing

On 6/9/20 11:55 PM, Bob Bridges wrote:
> LOL - you may just have made my tagline file, Bill.  We'll see whether I 
> still like it well enough tomorrow.  Like this:
>
> ---
> Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313
>
> The problem with journalism today is everyone thinks they are one  -Bill 
> Johnson in the listserv IBM-MAIN
>
> -Original Message-
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On 
> Behalf Of Bill Johnson
> Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 20:20
>
> I sent the author of this hit piece a few real journalistic pieces which 
> contradicted her claims. She responded kindly and stated she would do more 
> research (or any research in my opinion) if she did another mainframe piece. 
> The problem with journalism today is everyone thinks they are one, and sites 
> like tech republic are only interested in clicks & eyeballs to monetize the 
> material.
>
> ...


-- 
Joel C. Ewing

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-10 Thread Bill Johnson

I’d be honored.


Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone


On Wednesday, June 10, 2020, 3:22 AM, Bob Bridges  wrote:

LOL - you may just have made my tagline file, Bill.  We'll see whether I still 
like it well enough tomorrow.  Like this:

---
Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313

The problem with journalism today is everyone thinks they are one  -Bill 
Johnson in the listserv IBM-MAIN

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of Bill Johnson
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 20:20

I sent the author of this hit piece a few real journalistic pieces which 
contradicted her claims. She responded kindly and stated she would do more 
research (or any research in my opinion) if she did another mainframe piece. 
The problem with journalism today is everyone thinks they are one, and sites 
like tech republic are only interested in clicks & eyeballs to monetize the 
material.

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

Software development is not a zero sum game.


--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3


From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of Bob 
Bridges [robhbrid...@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 12:53 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

Appropriate tagline:

---
Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313

/* Most people thought [in 2000] that Web content should somehow be “free,”
a hopelessly naïve ideology known today as “dot-communism.”...Dot-communism
has been discarded along with its political counterpart, as users find that
the adjective “free” means, as it always does, “paid for by someone else,”
who insists on getting it back one way or another.  -David S Platt,
"Introducing Microsoft .NET, Third Edition", 2003 */

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
Behalf Of Seymour J Metz
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 20:16

I wish. GMU is using proprietary e-mail software and no longer allows access
via POP3 or IMAP4.


From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of
Farley, Peter x23353 [peter.far...@broadridge.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 5:53 PM

Add to that the open-source mindset that software SHOULD BY RIGHT be "free"
and you have a tough market to break into (again) from a for-profit company
perspective.

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-10 Thread Wayne Bickerdike

IBM are supporting university training in Mainframe in a hands-off manner.

A friend of mine has just run a COBOL course at a North Queensland
university. The mainframe used for classes was the Marist system.

The customers were a large Australian Bank and a territory government
employer. It seems that some big organisations here in Australia are not
exiting the mainframe as quickly as they envisaged and having pensioned off
the older mainframes, they are in a pickle.

I also ran courses a few years ago at Canberra University. We offered a
Degree and Masters level units. COBOL, DB2, CICS were the predominant items
with some z/VM.

The mainframe environment was supplied by IBM on the Dallas RDP setup.

All my students on the Masters class were from overseas, China and India.
One Chinese student was very good, I would have employed him

On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 2:55 PM Bob Bridges  wrote:

> LOL - you may just have made my tagline file, Bill.  We'll see whether I
> still like it well enough tomorrow.  Like this:
>
> ---
> Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313
>
> The problem with journalism today is everyone thinks they are one
> -Bill Johnson in the listserv IBM-MAIN
>
> -Original Message-
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
> Behalf Of Bill Johnson
> Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 20:20
>
> I sent the author of this hit piece a few real journalistic pieces which
> contradicted her claims. She responded kindly and stated she would do more
> research (or any research in my opinion) if she did another mainframe
> piece. The problem with journalism today is everyone thinks they are one,
> and sites like tech republic are only interested in clicks & eyeballs to
> monetize the material.
>
> --
> For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
> send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
>

-- 
Wayne V. Bickerdike

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

LOL - you may just have made my tagline file, Bill.  We'll see whether I still 
like it well enough tomorrow.  Like this:

---
Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313

The problem with journalism today is everyone thinks they are one  -Bill 
Johnson in the listserv IBM-MAIN

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of Bill Johnson
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 20:20

I sent the author of this hit piece a few real journalistic pieces which 
contradicted her claims. She responded kindly and stated she would do more 
research (or any research in my opinion) if she did another mainframe piece. 
The problem with journalism today is everyone thinks they are one, and sites 
like tech republic are only interested in clicks & eyeballs to monetize the 
material.

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

Appropriate tagline:

---
Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313

/* Most people thought [in 2000] that Web content should somehow be free,
a hopelessly naïve ideology known today as dot-communism....Dot-communism
has been discarded along with its political counterpart, as users find that
the adjective free means, as it always does, paid for by someone else,
who insists on getting it back one way or another.  -David S Platt,
"Introducing Microsoft .NET, Third Edition", 2003 */

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
Behalf Of Seymour J Metz
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 20:16

I wish. GMU is using proprietary e-mail software and no longer allows access
via POP3 or IMAP4.


From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of
Farley, Peter x23353 [peter.far...@broadridge.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 5:53 PM

Add to that the open-source mindset that software SHOULD BY RIGHT be "free"
and you have a tough market to break into (again) from a for-profit company
perspective.

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-09 Thread Mike Schwab

Yep.  We used to get a lot of errors for out of volumes in a storage
groups, and the users would want us to add more volumes.  For several
calls I would point out that the data set had a very small primary and
secondary space value.  I would go through all the extents on one
volume, then proceed through the rest, and run out volumes despite
lots of space in the storage group.  They didn't want to reallocate,
so I suggested they migrate and recall the dataset.  Then the existing
space would be in 1 extent on 1 volume and plenty of extents and
volumes to extend onto.  The problem started going away after that.

Would the new 1st extent on the first volume from the recall become
the default 1st allocation on subsequent volumes?

On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 12:48 AM Seymour J Metz  wrote:
>
> My pet peeve is the default for SPACE; "Absolute track not available" is not 
> a user friendly error message for forgetting to specify SPACE.
>
>
> --
> Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
> http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3
>
> 
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of 
> Bob Bridges [robhbrid...@gmail.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 8:33 PM
> To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
> Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"
>
> JCL: I used to complain about JCL's arcane and in some cases backward syntax. 
>  I mean, "COND=(0,LT,step.procstep)" - who made that up?  But somehow over 
> the years I've made my peace with JCL.  It is what it is.  And I would have 
> done no better, back then.
>
> EBCDIC: A couple of years ago, when I was employed by a small mainframe 
> security consulting company, a client came to them asking for help with a 
> project to create a security product that would reside on a distributed 
> platform but handle security on the mainframe.  They were going to develop it 
> for a client that was using Top Secret, but it could have been any of the 
> three.  These folks didn't know mainframes, which is why they hired my 
> employers, who assigned me to the project.
>
> I said they "didn't know mainframes"; let's start with the fact that they 
> didn't know about EBCDIC.  But that's no problem, right?  There are lots of 
> things one can do to translate between EBCDIC and ASCII.  In the process of 
> working on this project I wrote, my very own self, a socket server that would 
> handle both ASCII and EBCDIC clients.  (I mention this because I'd never done 
> any such thing before, and I was inordinately pleased with the fact that I 
> could do anything so cool.  Those of you who've done hundreds of those and 
> take it for granted, please don't burst my bubble.)
>
> Then they discovered the whole issue of 3270 emulation.  And I probably 
> wasn't helping by trying to explain the complexities of mainframe security at 
> about the same time.  The client went away to think about the communications 
> issue, and somehow they never came back; the project never went anywhere 
> after that.
>
> ---
> Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313
>
> /* Always look a gift horse in the mouth.  It may have hoof-and-mouth 
> disease.  -Bob Bridges, 1977 */
>
> -Original Message-
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On 
> Behalf Of Paul Gilmartin
> Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 19:18
> >
> Yes, but JCL.  JCL is to programming as Roman numerals are to arithmetic.
>
> And EBCDIC.  "Doesn't play well with others."
>
> --
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-- 
Mike A Schwab, Springfield IL USA
Where do Forest Rangers go to get away from it all?

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-09 Thread Edward Finnell

IBM used to offer HESC for VM .edus. There were different tiers but it was very 
cheap. We used it until they quit offering it. Well it's a long story IBM just 
stuck it's head in the ground and let the *nix assimilate.

In a message dated 6/9/2020 2:22:17 PM Central Standard Time, 
t...@tombrennansoftware.com writes:
I always thought that 
was super smart of them.  What I always thought was rather dumb, is that 
IBM doesn't do similar with educational use of all their software.  And 
that's just copied bits ... no wood, metal, delivery, tuning, etc.

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

My pet peeve is the default for SPACE; "Absolute track not available" is not a 
user friendly error message for forgetting to specify SPACE.


--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3


From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of Bob 
Bridges [robhbrid...@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 8:33 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

JCL: I used to complain about JCL's arcane and in some cases backward syntax.  
I mean, "COND=(0,LT,step.procstep)" - who made that up?  But somehow over the 
years I've made my peace with JCL.  It is what it is.  And I would have done no 
better, back then.

EBCDIC: A couple of years ago, when I was employed by a small mainframe 
security consulting company, a client came to them asking for help with a 
project to create a security product that would reside on a distributed 
platform but handle security on the mainframe.  They were going to develop it 
for a client that was using Top Secret, but it could have been any of the 
three.  These folks didn't know mainframes, which is why they hired my 
employers, who assigned me to the project.

I said they "didn't know mainframes"; let's start with the fact that they 
didn't know about EBCDIC.  But that's no problem, right?  There are lots of 
things one can do to translate between EBCDIC and ASCII.  In the process of 
working on this project I wrote, my very own self, a socket server that would 
handle both ASCII and EBCDIC clients.  (I mention this because I'd never done 
any such thing before, and I was inordinately pleased with the fact that I 
could do anything so cool.  Those of you who've done hundreds of those and take 
it for granted, please don't burst my bubble.)

Then they discovered the whole issue of 3270 emulation.  And I probably wasn't 
helping by trying to explain the complexities of mainframe security at about 
the same time.  The client went away to think about the communications issue, 
and somehow they never came back; the project never went anywhere after that.

---
Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313

/* Always look a gift horse in the mouth.  It may have hoof-and-mouth disease.  
-Bob Bridges, 1977 */

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of Paul Gilmartin
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 19:18
>
Yes, but JCL.  JCL is to programming as Roman numerals are to arithmetic.

And EBCDIC.  "Doesn't play well with others."

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

JCL: I used to complain about JCL's arcane and in some cases backward syntax.  
I mean, "COND=(0,LT,step.procstep)" - who made that up?  But somehow over the 
years I've made my peace with JCL.  It is what it is.  And I would have done no 
better, back then.

EBCDIC: A couple of years ago, when I was employed by a small mainframe 
security consulting company, a client came to them asking for help with a 
project to create a security product that would reside on a distributed 
platform but handle security on the mainframe.  They were going to develop it 
for a client that was using Top Secret, but it could have been any of the 
three.  These folks didn't know mainframes, which is why they hired my 
employers, who assigned me to the project.

I said they "didn't know mainframes"; let's start with the fact that they 
didn't know about EBCDIC.  But that's no problem, right?  There are lots of 
things one can do to translate between EBCDIC and ASCII.  In the process of 
working on this project I wrote, my very own self, a socket server that would 
handle both ASCII and EBCDIC clients.  (I mention this because I'd never done 
any such thing before, and I was inordinately pleased with the fact that I 
could do anything so cool.  Those of you who've done hundreds of those and take 
it for granted, please don't burst my bubble.)

Then they discovered the whole issue of 3270 emulation.  And I probably wasn't 
helping by trying to explain the complexities of mainframe security at about 
the same time.  The client went away to think about the communications issue, 
and somehow they never came back; the project never went anywhere after that.

---
Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313

/* Always look a gift horse in the mouth.  It may have hoof-and-mouth disease.  
-Bob Bridges, 1977 */

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of Paul Gilmartin
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 19:18
> 
Yes, but JCL.  JCL is to programming as Roman numerals are to arithmetic.

And EBCDIC.  "Doesn't play well with others."

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-09 Thread Bill Johnson

I sent the author of this hit piece a few real journalistic pieces which 
contradicted her claims. She responded kindly and stated she would do more 
research (or any research in my opinion) if she did another mainframe piece. 
The problem with journalism today is everyone thinks they are one, and sites 
like tech republic are only interested in clicks & eyeballs to monetize the 
material.


Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone


On Tuesday, June 9, 2020, 7:17 PM, Paul Gilmartin 
<000433f07816-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu> wrote:

On Tue, 9 Jun 2020 21:53:51 +, Farley, Peter  wrote:

>You're probably correct about the academic mindset and IBM's failure to 
>successfully market to them that the mainframe CAN do all the "cool" things 
>they perceive as the latest-and-greatest-idea(s), and is actively "keeping up" 
>with the best of those ideas.
> 
Yes, but JCL.  JCL is to programming as Roman numerals are to arithmetic.

And EBCDIC.  "Doesn't play well with others."

>Add to that the opensoource mindset that software SHOULD BY RIGHT be "free" 
>and you have a tough market to break into (again) from a for-profit company 
>perspective.
>
>The 20th century "80% discount" that IBM offered to academic institutions 
>pre-consent-decree would today probably be laughed right out of the Bursar's 
>or Treasurer's office.  20% of too-much-already is a lot more than they pay 
>for the little hardware beasts and the nothing they pay for the software that 
>runs on them.
>
>It's a tough sell now.  Would have been worlds easier if addressed 
>intelligently back then and continued into this century.
>
>It was an IBM chairman who declared o  investors that "IBM will never be in a 
>low-margin business".  They are getting what they asked for.

-- gil

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

> Add to that the open-source mindset that software SHOULD BY RIGHT be "free"

I wish. GMU is using proprietary e-mail software and no longer allows access 
via POP3 or IMAP4.


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Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3


From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of 
Farley, Peter x23353 [peter.far...@broadridge.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 5:53 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

You're probably correct about the academic mindset and IBM's failure to 
successfully market to them that the mainframe CAN do all the "cool" things 
they perceive as the latest-and-greatest-idea(s), and is actively "keeping up" 
with the best of those ideas.

Add to that the open-source mindset that software SHOULD BY RIGHT be "free" and 
you have a tough market to break into (again) from a for-profit company 
perspective.

The 20th century "80% discount" that IBM offered to academic institutions 
pre-consent-decree would today probably be laughed right out of the Bursar's or 
Treasurer's office.  20% of too-much-already is a lot more than they pay for 
the little hardware beasts and the nothing they pay for the software that runs 
on them.

It's a tough sell now.  Would have been worlds easier if addressed 
intelligently back then and continued into this century.

It was an IBM chairman who declared to investors that "IBM will never be in a 
low-margin business".  They are getting what they asked for.

Peter

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List  On Behalf Of Bob 
Bridges
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 5:27 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

I don't pay much attention to IBM's marketing practices so I can't opine 
knowledgeably, but I offer this counter, a story I'm sure I've told here 
before:  Some years ago my oldest son got interested in learning mainframes.  
(I think he must have heard me rant too often about my increasing job security, 
due to colleges ignoring mainframes and thus making old fogies like me less and 
less replaceable even as our salaries keep rising.)  So I started asking 
around:  Where might I rent a couple of mainframe IDs on a commercial data 
center, and how much might I pay for it?  I figured I'd start coaching him in 
the basics, and see how far his interest went.

I didn't make a big campaign of it, but I called here and there for a few 
weeks.  My questions must have gotten around, because one evening I got a call 
from someone at IBM with a very direct offer:  If I would contact my local 
university and get them to run a few classes in mainframes - almost any 
relevant class - the university would rent space at a data center and IBM would 
~give~ me two accounts that I could use to teach my son.  Heck, I could teach a 
class or two myself.

I called NC A State U, where I'd worked a couple years.  Couldn't arouse any 
interest.

Could be IBM isn't marketing themselves very strenuously.  Could be they're not 
losing market share and don't need to.  I don't know.  But it sounds to me like 
they're doing ~something~ at any rate.  But as far as I can tell, the colleges 
have this notion that mainframes are out of date, and can't get out of that 
mindset or notice the facts.

---

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of Tom Brennan
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 11:54

When I bought my Yamaha piano in 1989, I heard a story that Yamaha had been 
supplying free pianos to universities for years.  It was more than them just 
being nice, they knew that someone practicing every day on the school grand 
piano would likely go on to buy one, or be the decision maker for an orchestra, 
night club, or whatever.  I always thought that was super smart of them.  What 
I always thought was rather dumb, is that IBM doesn't do similar with 
educational use of all their software.  And that's just copied bits ... no 
wood, metal, delivery, tuning, etc.
--

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-09 Thread Paul Gilmartin

On Tue, 9 Jun 2020 21:53:51 +, Farley, Peter  wrote:

>You're probably correct about the academic mindset and IBM's failure to 
>successfully market to them that the mainframe CAN do all the "cool" things 
>they perceive as the latest-and-greatest-idea(s), and is actively "keeping up" 
>with the best of those ideas.
> 
Yes, but JCL.  JCL is to programming as Roman numerals are to arithmetic.

And EBCDIC.  "Doesn't play well with others."

>Add to that the opensoource mindset that software SHOULD BY RIGHT be "free" 
>and you have a tough market to break into (again) from a for-profit company 
>perspective.
>
>The 20th century "80% discount" that IBM offered to academic institutions 
>pre-consent-decree would today probably be laughed right out of the Bursar's 
>or Treasurer's office.  20% of too-much-already is a lot more than they pay 
>for the little hardware beasts and the nothing they pay for the software that 
>runs on them.
>
>It's a tough sell now.  Would have been worlds easier if addressed 
>intelligently back then and continued into this century.
>
>It was an IBM chairman who declared o  investors that "IBM will never be in a 
>low-margin business".  They are getting what they asked for.

-- gil

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-09 Thread Ron Wells

Unfortunate IBM does not offer systems or training for schools. The flood of 
kids knowing what it is vs the teachings that go on today, I would say you 
would see a swing back...over night..

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List  On Behalf Of Bob 
Bridges
Sent: Tuesday, June 09, 2020 4:27 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

** EXTERNAL EMAIL - USE CAUTION **

I don't pay much attention to IBM's marketing practices so I can't opine 
knowledgeably, but I offer this counter, a story I'm sure I've told here 
before:  Some years ago my oldest son got interested in learning mainframes.  
(I think he must have heard me rant too often about my increasing job security, 
due to colleges ignoring mainframes and thus making old fogies like me less and 
less replaceable even as our salaries keep rising.)  So I started asking 
around:  Where might I rent a couple of mainframe IDs on a commercial data 
center, and how much might I pay for it?  I figured I'd start coaching him in 
the basics, and see how far his interest went.

I didn't make a big campaign of it, but I called here and there for a few 
weeks.  My questions must have gotten around, because one evening I got a call 
from someone at IBM with a very direct offer:  If I would contact my local 
university and get them to run a few classes in mainframes - almost any 
relevant class - the university would rent space at a data center and IBM would 
~give~ me two accounts that I could use to teach my son.  Heck, I could teach a 
class or two myself.

I called NC A State U, where I'd worked a couple years.  Couldn't arouse any 
interest.

Could be IBM isn't marketing themselves very strenuously.  Could be they're not 
losing market share and don't need to.  I don't know.  But it sounds to me like 
they're doing ~something~ at any rate.  But as far as I can tell, the colleges 
have this notion that mainframes are out of date, and can't get out of that 
mindset or notice the facts.

---
Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313

/* In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you 
cannot get by looking for it.  If you look for truth, you may find comfort in 
the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth — 
only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.  
-CS Lewis in _The Case for Christianity_ */

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of Tom Brennan
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 11:54

When I bought my Yamaha piano in 1989, I heard a story that Yamaha had been 
supplying free pianos to universities for years.  It was more than them just 
being nice, they knew that someone practicing every day on the school grand 
piano would likely go on to buy one, or be the decision maker for an orchestra, 
night club, or whatever.  I always thought that was super smart of them.  What 
I always thought was rather dumb, is that IBM doesn't do similar with 
educational use of all their software.  And that's just copied bits ... no 
wood, metal, delivery, tuning, etc.

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

You're probably correct about the academic mindset and IBM's failure to 
successfully market to them that the mainframe CAN do all the "cool" things 
they perceive as the latest-and-greatest-idea(s), and is actively "keeping up" 
with the best of those ideas.

Add to that the open-source mindset that software SHOULD BY RIGHT be "free" and 
you have a tough market to break into (again) from a for-profit company 
perspective.

The 20th century "80% discount" that IBM offered to academic institutions 
pre-consent-decree would today probably be laughed right out of the Bursar's or 
Treasurer's office.  20% of too-much-already is a lot more than they pay for 
the little hardware beasts and the nothing they pay for the software that runs 
on them.

It's a tough sell now.  Would have been worlds easier if addressed 
intelligently back then and continued into this century.

It was an IBM chairman who declared to investors that "IBM will never be in a 
low-margin business".  They are getting what they asked for.

Peter

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List  On Behalf Of Bob 
Bridges
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 5:27 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

I don't pay much attention to IBM's marketing practices so I can't opine 
knowledgeably, but I offer this counter, a story I'm sure I've told here 
before:  Some years ago my oldest son got interested in learning mainframes.  
(I think he must have heard me rant too often about my increasing job security, 
due to colleges ignoring mainframes and thus making old fogies like me less and 
less replaceable even as our salaries keep rising.)  So I started asking 
around:  Where might I rent a couple of mainframe IDs on a commercial data 
center, and how much might I pay for it?  I figured I'd start coaching him in 
the basics, and see how far his interest went.

I didn't make a big campaign of it, but I called here and there for a few 
weeks.  My questions must have gotten around, because one evening I got a call 
from someone at IBM with a very direct offer:  If I would contact my local 
university and get them to run a few classes in mainframes - almost any 
relevant class - the university would rent space at a data center and IBM would 
~give~ me two accounts that I could use to teach my son.  Heck, I could teach a 
class or two myself.

I called NC A State U, where I'd worked a couple years.  Couldn't arouse any 
interest.

Could be IBM isn't marketing themselves very strenuously.  Could be they're not 
losing market share and don't need to.  I don't know.  But it sounds to me like 
they're doing ~something~ at any rate.  But as far as I can tell, the colleges 
have this notion that mainframes are out of date, and can't get out of that 
mindset or notice the facts.

---

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of Tom Brennan
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 11:54

When I bought my Yamaha piano in 1989, I heard a story that Yamaha had been 
supplying free pianos to universities for years.  It was more than them just 
being nice, they knew that someone practicing every day on the school grand 
piano would likely go on to buy one, or be the decision maker for an orchestra, 
night club, or whatever.  I always thought that was super smart of them.  What 
I always thought was rather dumb, is that IBM doesn't do similar with 
educational use of all their software.  And that's just copied bits ... no 
wood, metal, delivery, tuning, etc.
--

This message and any attachments are intended only for the use of the addressee 
and may contain information that is privileged and confidential. If the reader 
of the message is not the intended recipient or an authorized representative of 
the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination of this 
communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication 
in error, please notify us immediately by e-mail and delete the message and any 
attachments from your system.


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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

I don't pay much attention to IBM's marketing practices so I can't opine 
knowledgeably, but I offer this counter, a story I'm sure I've told here 
before:  Some years ago my oldest son got interested in learning mainframes.  
(I think he must have heard me rant too often about my increasing job security, 
due to colleges ignoring mainframes and thus making old fogies like me less and 
less replaceable even as our salaries keep rising.)  So I started asking 
around:  Where might I rent a couple of mainframe IDs on a commercial data 
center, and how much might I pay for it?  I figured I'd start coaching him in 
the basics, and see how far his interest went.

I didn't make a big campaign of it, but I called here and there for a few 
weeks.  My questions must have gotten around, because one evening I got a call 
from someone at IBM with a very direct offer:  If I would contact my local 
university and get them to run a few classes in mainframes - almost any 
relevant class - the university would rent space at a data center and IBM would 
~give~ me two accounts that I could use to teach my son.  Heck, I could teach a 
class or two myself.

I called NC A State U, where I'd worked a couple years.  Couldn't arouse any 
interest.

Could be IBM isn't marketing themselves very strenuously.  Could be they're not 
losing market share and don't need to.  I don't know.  But it sounds to me like 
they're doing ~something~ at any rate.  But as far as I can tell, the colleges 
have this notion that mainframes are out of date, and can't get out of that 
mindset or notice the facts.

---
Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313

/* In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you 
cannot get by looking for it.  If you look for truth, you may find comfort in 
the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth — 
only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.  
-CS Lewis in _The Case for Christianity_ */

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of Tom Brennan
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 11:54

When I bought my Yamaha piano in 1989, I heard a story that Yamaha had 
been supplying free pianos to universities for years.  It was more than 
them just being nice, they knew that someone practicing every day on the 
school grand piano would likely go on to buy one, or be the decision 
maker for an orchestra, night club, or whatever.  I always thought that 
was super smart of them.  What I always thought was rather dumb, is that 
IBM doesn't do similar with educational use of all their software.  And 
that's just copied bits ... no wood, metal, delivery, tuning, etc.

--
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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-09 Thread Mike Schwab

Apple Did the high school thing.  That's where they got their devotees.

On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 3:54 PM Tom Brennan  wrote:
>
> When I bought my Yamaha piano in 1989, I heard a story that Yamaha had
> been supplying free pianos to universities for years.  It was more than
> them just being nice, they knew that someone practicing every day on the
> school grand piano would likely go on to buy one, or be the decision
> maker for an orchestra, night club, or whatever.  I always thought that
> was super smart of them.  What I always thought was rather dumb, is that
> IBM doesn't do similar with educational use of all their software.  And
> that's just copied bits ... no wood, metal, delivery, tuning, etc.
>
> On 6/9/2020 5:02 AM, Bob Bridges wrote:
> > A coworker just sent me this brief article.
> >
> > https://www.techrepublic.com/article/everyone-wants-to-retire-mainframes-but-74-of-modernization-efforts-fail/
> >
> > I'm interested in two aspects of this:
> >
> > 1) The writer uses the word "modernization" quite a bit, and as far as I 
> > can tell she uses it, without explanation, to mean "switching from 
> > mainframes to more recently invented platforms".  This is the old 
> > assumption we've talked about recently.
> >
> > 2) There's a really surprising number in there:
> >
> > "...almost 100% of survey respondents plan to move legacy applications to 
> > the cloud this year and the motivation to move is clear:
> >
> > - 60% strongly agree they will be left behind competitively if they fail to 
> > modernize
> > - 33% say modernizing has allowed the company to be more reactive to market 
> > changes
> > - 34% say legacy modernization has accelerated digital transformation 
> > projects
> >
> > About three-quarters of leaders said they have started a modernization 
> > program but failed to complete it"
> >
> > Can that "almost 100%" claim be true?  I confess that three out of my last 
> > three clients are talking about eliminating the mainframe, but I supposed 
> > it to be an anomaly.  Maybe the survey used the word "modernize" and the 
> > author ~assumed~ this must mean dropping the mainframe.
> >
> > The article also says "Mainframes are still critical to business operations 
> > with 71% of the Fortune 500 depending on these machines, including 92 of 
> > the world's 100 largest banks".  Come on - she's telling us that almost 
> > ~all~ of those companies intend to switch legacy applications to the cloud? 
> >  I just can't buy that.  ~My~ bank had certainly better not be planning 
> > such a move.
> >
> > ---
> > Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313
> >
> > /* If a problem has a single neck, it has a simple solution. */
> >
> > --
> > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
> > send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
> >
> >
>
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-- 
Mike A Schwab, Springfield IL USA
Where do Forest Rangers go to get away from it all?

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

Probably a combination of legal issues and lack of vision. Didn't the consent 
decree kill the 80% discount?


--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3


From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of Tom 
Brennan [t...@tombrennansoftware.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 11:54 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

When I bought my Yamaha piano in 1989, I heard a story that Yamaha had
been supplying free pianos to universities for years.  It was more than
them just being nice, they knew that someone practicing every day on the
school grand piano would likely go on to buy one, or be the decision
maker for an orchestra, night club, or whatever.  I always thought that
was super smart of them.  What I always thought was rather dumb, is that
IBM doesn't do similar with educational use of all their software.  And
that's just copied bits ... no wood, metal, delivery, tuning, etc.

On 6/9/2020 5:02 AM, Bob Bridges wrote:
> A coworker just sent me this brief article.
>
> https://secure-web.cisco.com/1h8_Z1HJHyWR1DS49jM-fQ5QyC79B4AjQ5BJAf2QNfWMe6S3QU5rquqDgOE7nbyVmlJOtpB29Od29EHvWRGu0oEaJeM54xC24QLMdQqxASXpXu3z7T6o8Wkw7U1s-WuyDkka_vYd3P4kLQJbPc0aO0RVrTEMg3eMLhMPLlwLbd1pYgapP45w3yusjNB_mTTALGW1I1S9C1E1FuKVX94TL8i6WJN_g28L_Us1Slg3oPqA__zxdzx6qo3K8zfRXhtw9i3EeL22VLdlFiMMhopyxBW4w3PQ3H3GvVFwHduh4SVhvng0XPXP5Fgy3XUueIy9eH0D3BVpAN7yHlLa1kHdEokIUN6gEN4CNVhKswKjwD3xO9gc0OosCbs3CoAM6TNm7EiPQwapZy5FIyKlh58OAsQm_62cVKJm2UA78hL-1jK4hrbwdt-54F8rv2GujDrZ4/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.techrepublic.com%2Farticle%2Feveryone-wants-to-retire-mainframes-but-74-of-modernization-efforts-fail%2F
>
> I'm interested in two aspects of this:
>
> 1) The writer uses the word "modernization" quite a bit, and as far as I can 
> tell she uses it, without explanation, to mean "switching from mainframes to 
> more recently invented platforms".  This is the old assumption we've talked 
> about recently.
>
> 2) There's a really surprising number in there:
>
> "...almost 100% of survey respondents plan to move legacy applications to the 
> cloud this year and the motivation to move is clear:
>
> - 60% strongly agree they will be left behind competitively if they fail to 
> modernize
> - 33% say modernizing has allowed the company to be more reactive to market 
> changes
> - 34% say legacy modernization has accelerated digital transformation projects
>
> About three-quarters of leaders said they have started a modernization 
> program but failed to complete it"
>
> Can that "almost 100%" claim be true?  I confess that three out of my last 
> three clients are talking about eliminating the mainframe, but I supposed it 
> to be an anomaly.  Maybe the survey used the word "modernize" and the author 
> ~assumed~ this must mean dropping the mainframe.
>
> The article also says "Mainframes are still critical to business operations 
> with 71% of the Fortune 500 depending on these machines, including 92 of the 
> world's 100 largest banks".  Come on - she's telling us that almost ~all~ of 
> those companies intend to switch legacy applications to the cloud?  I just 
> can't buy that.  ~My~ bank had certainly better not be planning such a move.
>
> ---
> Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313
>
> /* If a problem has a single neck, it has a simple solution. */
>
> --
> For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
> send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
>
>

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-09 Thread Paul Gilmartin

On Tue, 9 Jun 2020 17:23:48 +, Doug wrote:

>And maybe the third dumb thing they did was give DOS to Gates and trash 
>OS/2
>
And way before that, not making PL/S a product.  It left a void that's
belatedly being filled by Metal C.

>-- Original Message --
>From: "Farley, Peter x23353"
>Sent: 09-Jun-20 12:25:16
>
>>The first really dumb thing that IBM did was to STOP providing heavily 
>>discounted mainframe hardware and software to universities and colleges.  The 
>>NYC public colleges (CUNY, City University of New York) used to offer courses 
>>in COBOL and VSAM and many other mainframe technologies in the 1970's and 
>>into the 1980's, as did prestigious universities like NYU, but by the time my 
>>son attended CUNY post-2000 there were none of these courses available any 
>>more.  Everything in the CS area was x86 hardware and Linux OS based.
>>
>>The second really dumb thing that IBM did was to stop caring and feeding 
>>smaller commercial businesses running various combinations of DOS / VSE / VM 
>>software on (then) less-expensive hardware, at least in the US.  I think 
>>Europe still has a thriving or at least surviving VM/VSE community.  
>>Successful small businesses, while less profitable in the present can easily 
>>over time become larger businesses needing the IBM flagship OS and 
>>corresponding hardware.  No small ecosystem growing into a larger ecosystem 
>>means the potentially profitable pipeline dries up.
>>
>>Just my personal opinions of course.
>>
>>-Original Message-
>>From: Tom Brennan
>>Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 11:54 AM
>>
>>When I bought my Yamaha piano in 1989, I heard a story that Yamaha had been 
>>supplying free pianos to universities for years.  It was more than them just 
>>being nice, they knew that someone practicing every day on the school grand 
>>piano would likely go on to buy one, or be the decision maker for an 
>>orchestra, night club, or whatever.  I always thought that was super smart of 
>>them.  What I always thought was rather dumb, is that IBM doesn't do similar 
>>with educational use of all their software.  And that's just copied bits ... 
>>no wood, metal, delivery, tuning, etc.
>>
Was the (1959?) Consent Decree an obstacle to that?  Did IBM partly
persist under the umbrella of R partnerships?

>>On 6/9/2020 5:02 AM, Bob Bridges wrote:
>>>  A coworker just sent me this brief article.
>>>
>>>  
>>> https://www.techrepublic.com/article/everyone-wants-to-retire-mainframes-but-74-of-modernization-efforts-fail/

-- gil

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-09 Thread Doug

And maybe the third dumb thing they did was give DOS to Gates and trash 
OS/2

Doug Fuerst
d...@bkassociates.net

-- Original Message --
From: "Farley, Peter x23353" 
To: IBM-MAIN@listserv.ua.edu
Sent: 09-Jun-20 12:25:16
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

The first really dumb thing that IBM did was to STOP providing heavily 
discounted mainframe hardware and software to universities and colleges.  The 
NYC public colleges (CUNY, City University of New York) used to offer courses 
in COBOL and VSAM and many other mainframe technologies in the 1970's and into 
the 1980's, as did prestigious universities like NYU, but by the time my son 
attended CUNY post-2000 there were none of these courses available any more.  
Everything in the CS area was x86 hardware and Linux OS based.

The second really dumb thing that IBM did was to stop caring and feeding 
smaller commercial businesses running various combinations of DOS / VSE / VM 
software on (then) less-expensive hardware, at least in the US.  I think Europe 
still has a thriving or at least surviving VM/VSE community.  Successful small 
businesses, while less profitable in the present can easily over time become 
larger businesses needing the IBM flagship OS and corresponding hardware.  No 
small ecosystem growing into a larger ecosystem means the potentially 
profitable pipeline dries up.

Just my personal opinions of course.

Peter

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List  On Behalf Of Tom 
Brennan
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 11:54 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

When I bought my Yamaha piano in 1989, I heard a story that Yamaha had been 
supplying free pianos to universities for years.  It was more than them just 
being nice, they knew that someone practicing every day on the school grand 
piano would likely go on to buy one, or be the decision maker for an orchestra, 
night club, or whatever.  I always thought that was super smart of them.  What 
I always thought was rather dumb, is that IBM doesn't do similar with 
educational use of all their software.  And that's just copied bits ... no 
wood, metal, delivery, tuning, etc.

On 6/9/2020 5:02 AM, Bob Bridges wrote:

 A coworker just sent me this brief article.

 https://www.techrepublic.com/article/everyone-wants-to-retire-mainfram
 es-but-74-of-modernization-efforts-fail/

 I'm interested in two aspects of this:

 1) The writer uses the word "modernization" quite a bit, and as far as I can tell she 
uses it, without explanation, to mean "switching from mainframes to more recently invented 
platforms".  This is the old assumption we've talked about recently.

 2) There's a really surprising number in there:

 "...almost 100% of survey respondents plan to move legacy applications to the 
cloud this year and the motivation to move is clear:

 - 60% strongly agree they will be left behind competitively if they
 fail to modernize
 - 33% say modernizing has allowed the company to be more reactive to
 market changes
 - 34% say legacy modernization has accelerated digital transformation
 projects

 About three-quarters of leaders said they have started a modernization program but 
failed to complete it"

 Can that "almost 100%" claim be true?  I confess that three out of my last three clients 
are talking about eliminating the mainframe, but I supposed it to be an anomaly.  Maybe the survey 
used the word "modernize" and the author ~assumed~ this must mean dropping the mainframe.

 The article also says "Mainframes are still critical to business operations with 
71% of the Fortune 500 depending on these machines, including 92 of the world's 100 
largest banks".  Come on - she's telling us that almost ~all~ of those companies 
intend to switch legacy applications to the cloud?  I just can't buy that.  ~My~ bank had 
certainly better not be planning such a move.

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

True, but not entirely satisfactorily.  Many of the "newer" (FSVO "new") 
complex instructions have yet to be added to any of the Hercules emulator 
systems, so "full" emulation as available in zPDT isn't truly available (yet, 
until/unless more people contribute and make it so).

IMHO IBM could easily make the zPDT system with its developer-level CPU / I/O 
governors to prevent "production" level performance at a realistic hobbyist 
cost level.  But it seems as if zPDT is just another profit opportunity in 
their minds, rather than a community-builder.  In the long run, 
community-building will wind up far more profitable, but that view seems not to 
have penetrated the IBM decision-makers' minds.

What would really blow my mind would be regularly released copies of the 
(in?)famous "Redbook" copy of PoOPS with all the micro- and milli-code 
documentation which could provide a way to (perhaps) quickly be able to emulate 
many of the "new" more complex instructions with micro- and milli-code 
emulation in addition to software emulation of the silicon-implemented 
instructions.

*Never* going to happen of course, because then (heaven forfend!) there could 
well be a re-incarnation of the "clone wars", but one can dream.

Peter

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List  On Behalf Of 
John McKown
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 12:50 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 11:38 AM Farley, Peter x23353 < 
peter.far...@broadridge.com> wrote:

> John,
>
> It isn't just the $900 per year for the ADCD OS license.  You can’t 
> legally get ADCD without the ~$5K yearly cost of the zPDT dongle and 
> Linux hardware emulation layer to run the OS's.  That's the real kicker.
>
> OTOH I wouldn't be surprised if bad-actor state security organizations 
> (or US security skunkworks organizations for that matter) haven't 
> already reverse-engineered the zPDT dongle for their own nefarious uses.
> Paranoid?  Maybe, maybe not.
>

I have read "elsewhere" that some people got at least some earlier versions of 
z/OS to run on a PC using Hercules/390. So the "bad actor" states likely can 
run z/OS.

>
> Peter
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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 11:38 AM Farley, Peter x23353 <
peter.far...@broadridge.com> wrote:

> John,
>
> It isn't just the $900 per year for the ADCD OS license.  You can’t
> legally get ADCD without the ~$5K yearly cost of the zPDT dongle and Linux
> hardware emulation layer to run the OS's.  That's the real kicker.
>
> OTOH I wouldn't be surprised if bad-actor state security organizations (or
> US security skunkworks organizations for that matter) haven't already
> reverse-engineered the zPDT dongle for their own nefarious uses.
> Paranoid?  Maybe, maybe not.
>

I have read "elsewhere" that some people got at least some earlier versions
of z/OS to run on a PC using Hercules/390. So the "bad actor" states likely
can run z/OS.



>
> Peter
>
>
>
-- 
People in sleeping bags are the soft tacos of the bear world.
Maranatha! <><
John McKown

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 11:28 AM PINION, RICHARD W. 
wrote:

> That's just the price of the current ADCD offering.  To license
> zPDT itself is roughly $4,000/emulated CPU.
>

In the words of Emily Latilla: "Never mind."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjYoNL4g5Vg



>
> -Original Message-
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List  On Behalf
> Of John McKown
> Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 12:24 PM
> To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
> Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"
>
> [External Email. Exercise caution when clicking links or opening
> attachments.]
>
> On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 10:54 AM Tom Brennan 
> wrote:
>
> > When I bought my Yamaha piano in 1989, I heard a story that Yamaha had
> > been supplying free pianos to universities for years.  It was more
> > than them just being nice, they knew that someone practicing every day
> > on the school grand piano would likely go on to buy one, or be the
> > decision maker for an orchestra, night club, or whatever.  I always
> > thought that was super smart of them.  What I always thought was
> > rather dumb, is that IBM doesn't do similar with educational use of
> > all their software.  And that's just copied bits ... no wood, metal,
> delivery, tuning, etc.
> >
> >
> I want an _affordable_ version of zPDT for _myself_ as a _hobbiest_. The
> current zPDT seems to be for "home workers" of an ISV or maybe office
> workers for a 2-3 person operation (IDK). I just looked and it is $900/yr
> U.S. . I can afford that. But I'm not an ISV. And I don't want to "bother"
> with whatever it takes to convince IBM that I am an ISV. Mainly because
> I'd be lying through my teeth. And I'm not a scum politician, so I'm
> adverse to doing that. {yeah, I'm being tacky}
>
>
> --
> People in sleeping bags are the soft tacos of the bear world.
> Maranatha! <><
> John McKown
>
> --
> For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email
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-- 
People in sleeping bags are the soft tacos of the bear world.
Maranatha! <><
John McKown

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

John,

It isn't just the $900 per year for the ADCD OS license.  You can’t legally get 
ADCD without the ~$5K yearly cost of the zPDT dongle and Linux hardware 
emulation layer to run the OS's.  That's the real kicker.

OTOH I wouldn't be surprised if bad-actor state security organizations (or US 
security skunkworks organizations for that matter) haven't already 
reverse-engineered the zPDT dongle for their own nefarious uses.  Paranoid?  
Maybe, maybe not.

Peter

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List  On Behalf Of 
John McKown
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 12:24 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 10:54 AM Tom Brennan 
wrote:

> When I bought my Yamaha piano in 1989, I heard a story that Yamaha had 
> been supplying free pianos to universities for years.  It was more 
> than them just being nice, they knew that someone practicing every day 
> on the school grand piano would likely go on to buy one, or be the 
> decision maker for an orchestra, night club, or whatever.  I always 
> thought that was super smart of them.  What I always thought was 
> rather dumb, is that IBM doesn't do similar with educational use of 
> all their software.  And that's just copied bits ... no wood, metal, 
> delivery, tuning, etc.
>
>
I want an _affordable_ version of zPDT for _myself_ as a _hobbiest_. The 
current zPDT seems to be for "home workers" of an ISV or maybe office workers 
for a 2-3 person operation (IDK). I just looked and it is $900/yr U.S. . I can 
afford that. But I'm not an ISV. And I don't want to "bother"
with whatever it takes to convince IBM that I am an ISV. Mainly because I'd be 
lying through my teeth. And I'm not a scum politician, so I'm adverse to doing 
that. {yeah, I'm being tacky}

--

This message and any attachments are intended only for the use of the addressee 
and may contain information that is privileged and confidential. If the reader 
of the message is not the intended recipient or an authorized representative of 
the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination of this 
communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication 
in error, please notify us immediately by e-mail and delete the message and any 
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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-09 Thread PINION, RICHARD W.

That's just the price of the current ADCD offering.  To license
zPDT itself is roughly $4,000/emulated CPU.

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List  On Behalf Of 
John McKown
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 12:24 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

[External Email. Exercise caution when clicking links or opening attachments.]

On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 10:54 AM Tom Brennan 
wrote:

> When I bought my Yamaha piano in 1989, I heard a story that Yamaha had 
> been supplying free pianos to universities for years.  It was more 
> than them just being nice, they knew that someone practicing every day 
> on the school grand piano would likely go on to buy one, or be the 
> decision maker for an orchestra, night club, or whatever.  I always 
> thought that was super smart of them.  What I always thought was 
> rather dumb, is that IBM doesn't do similar with educational use of 
> all their software.  And that's just copied bits ... no wood, metal, 
> delivery, tuning, etc.
>
>
I want an _affordable_ version of zPDT for _myself_ as a _hobbiest_. The 
current zPDT seems to be for "home workers" of an ISV or maybe office workers 
for a 2-3 person operation (IDK). I just looked and it is $900/yr U.S. . I can 
afford that. But I'm not an ISV. And I don't want to "bother"
with whatever it takes to convince IBM that I am an ISV. Mainly because I'd be 
lying through my teeth. And I'm not a scum politician, so I'm adverse to doing 
that. {yeah, I'm being tacky}


--
People in sleeping bags are the soft tacos of the bear world.
Maranatha! <><
John McKown

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

The first really dumb thing that IBM did was to STOP providing heavily 
discounted mainframe hardware and software to universities and colleges.  The 
NYC public colleges (CUNY, City University of New York) used to offer courses 
in COBOL and VSAM and many other mainframe technologies in the 1970's and into 
the 1980's, as did prestigious universities like NYU, but by the time my son 
attended CUNY post-2000 there were none of these courses available any more.  
Everything in the CS area was x86 hardware and Linux OS based.

The second really dumb thing that IBM did was to stop caring and feeding 
smaller commercial businesses running various combinations of DOS / VSE / VM 
software on (then) less-expensive hardware, at least in the US.  I think Europe 
still has a thriving or at least surviving VM/VSE community.  Successful small 
businesses, while less profitable in the present can easily over time become 
larger businesses needing the IBM flagship OS and corresponding hardware.  No 
small ecosystem growing into a larger ecosystem means the potentially 
profitable pipeline dries up.

Just my personal opinions of course.

Peter

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List  On Behalf Of Tom 
Brennan
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 11:54 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

When I bought my Yamaha piano in 1989, I heard a story that Yamaha had been 
supplying free pianos to universities for years.  It was more than them just 
being nice, they knew that someone practicing every day on the school grand 
piano would likely go on to buy one, or be the decision maker for an orchestra, 
night club, or whatever.  I always thought that was super smart of them.  What 
I always thought was rather dumb, is that IBM doesn't do similar with 
educational use of all their software.  And that's just copied bits ... no 
wood, metal, delivery, tuning, etc.

On 6/9/2020 5:02 AM, Bob Bridges wrote:
> A coworker just sent me this brief article.
> 
> https://www.techrepublic.com/article/everyone-wants-to-retire-mainfram
> es-but-74-of-modernization-efforts-fail/
> 
> I'm interested in two aspects of this:
> 
> 1) The writer uses the word "modernization" quite a bit, and as far as I can 
> tell she uses it, without explanation, to mean "switching from mainframes to 
> more recently invented platforms".  This is the old assumption we've talked 
> about recently.
> 
> 2) There's a really surprising number in there:
> 
> "...almost 100% of survey respondents plan to move legacy applications to the 
> cloud this year and the motivation to move is clear:
> 
> - 60% strongly agree they will be left behind competitively if they 
> fail to modernize
> - 33% say modernizing has allowed the company to be more reactive to 
> market changes
> - 34% say legacy modernization has accelerated digital transformation 
> projects
> 
> About three-quarters of leaders said they have started a modernization 
> program but failed to complete it"
> 
> Can that "almost 100%" claim be true?  I confess that three out of my last 
> three clients are talking about eliminating the mainframe, but I supposed it 
> to be an anomaly.  Maybe the survey used the word "modernize" and the author 
> ~assumed~ this must mean dropping the mainframe.
> 
> The article also says "Mainframes are still critical to business operations 
> with 71% of the Fortune 500 depending on these machines, including 92 of the 
> world's 100 largest banks".  Come on - she's telling us that almost ~all~ of 
> those companies intend to switch legacy applications to the cloud?  I just 
> can't buy that.  ~My~ bank had certainly better not be planning such a move.
> 
---

This message and any attachments are intended only for the use of the addressee 
and may contain information that is privileged and confidential. If the reader 
of the message is not the intended recipient or an authorized representative of 
the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination of this 
communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication 
in error, please notify us immediately by e-mail and delete the message and any 
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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 10:54 AM Tom Brennan 
wrote:

> When I bought my Yamaha piano in 1989, I heard a story that Yamaha had
> been supplying free pianos to universities for years.  It was more than
> them just being nice, they knew that someone practicing every day on the
> school grand piano would likely go on to buy one, or be the decision
> maker for an orchestra, night club, or whatever.  I always thought that
> was super smart of them.  What I always thought was rather dumb, is that
> IBM doesn't do similar with educational use of all their software.  And
> that's just copied bits ... no wood, metal, delivery, tuning, etc.
>
>
I want an _affordable_ version of zPDT for _myself_ as a _hobbiest_. The
current zPDT seems to be for "home workers" of an ISV or maybe office
workers for a 2-3 person operation (IDK). I just looked and it is $900/yr
U.S. . I can afford that. But I'm not an ISV. And I don't want to "bother"
with whatever it takes to convince IBM that I am an ISV. Mainly because I'd
be lying through my teeth. And I'm not a scum politician, so I'm adverse to
doing that. {yeah, I'm being tacky}


-- 
People in sleeping bags are the soft tacos of the bear world.
Maranatha! <><
John McKown

--
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
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Re: [External] Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-09 Thread Pommier, Rex

Years ago, IBM did sell hardware/software to universities at deeply discounted 
prices to attract young people to them.  Why they stopped is anybody's guess.

Rex

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List  On Behalf Of Tom 
Brennan
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 10:54 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: [External] Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

When I bought my Yamaha piano in 1989, I heard a story that Yamaha had been 
supplying free pianos to universities for years.  It was more than them just 
being nice, they knew that someone practicing every day on the school grand 
piano would likely go on to buy one, or be the decision maker for an orchestra, 
night club, or whatever.  I always thought that was super smart of them.  What 
I always thought was rather dumb, is that IBM doesn't do similar with 
educational use of all their software.  And that's just copied bits ... no 
wood, metal, delivery, tuning, etc.

On 6/9/2020 5:02 AM, Bob Bridges wrote:
> A coworker just sent me this brief article.
> 
> https://www.techrepublic.com/article/everyone-wants-to-retire-mainfram
> es-but-74-of-modernization-efforts-fail/
> 
> I'm interested in two aspects of this:
> 
> 1) The writer uses the word "modernization" quite a bit, and as far as I can 
> tell she uses it, without explanation, to mean "switching from mainframes to 
> more recently invented platforms".  This is the old assumption we've talked 
> about recently.
> 
> 2) There's a really surprising number in there:
> 
> "...almost 100% of survey respondents plan to move legacy applications to the 
> cloud this year and the motivation to move is clear:
> 
> - 60% strongly agree they will be left behind competitively if they 
> fail to modernize
> - 33% say modernizing has allowed the company to be more reactive to 
> market changes
> - 34% say legacy modernization has accelerated digital transformation 
> projects
> 
> About three-quarters of leaders said they have started a modernization 
> program but failed to complete it"
> 
> Can that "almost 100%" claim be true?  I confess that three out of my last 
> three clients are talking about eliminating the mainframe, but I supposed it 
> to be an anomaly.  Maybe the survey used the word "modernize" and the author 
> ~assumed~ this must mean dropping the mainframe.
> 
> The article also says "Mainframes are still critical to business operations 
> with 71% of the Fortune 500 depending on these machines, including 92 of the 
> world's 100 largest banks".  Come on - she's telling us that almost ~all~ of 
> those companies intend to switch legacy applications to the cloud?  I just 
> can't buy that.  ~My~ bank had certainly better not be planning such a move.
> 
> ---
> Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313
> 
> /* If a problem has a single neck, it has a simple solution. */
> 
> --
> For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send 
> email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
> 
> 

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-09 Thread Tom Brennan

When I bought my Yamaha piano in 1989, I heard a story that Yamaha had
been supplying free pianos to universities for years. It was more than
them just being nice, they knew that someone practicing every day on the
school grand piano would likely go on to buy one, or be the decision
maker for an orchestra, night club, or whatever. I always thought that
was super smart of them. What I always thought was rather dumb, is that
IBM doesn't do similar with educational use of all their software. And
that's just copied bits ... no wood, metal, delivery, tuning, etc.

On 6/9/2020 5:02 AM, Bob Bridges wrote:

A coworker just sent me this brief article.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/everyone-wants-to-retire-mainframes-but-74-of-modernization-efforts-fail/

I'm interested in two aspects of this:

1) The writer uses the word "modernization" quite a bit, and as far as I can tell she
uses it, without explanation, to mean "switching from mainframes to more recently invented
platforms". This is the old assumption we've talked about recently.

2) There's a really surprising number in there:

"...almost 100% of survey respondents plan to move legacy applications to the
cloud this year and the motivation to move is clear:

- 60% strongly agree they will be left behind competitively if they fail to
modernize
- 33% say modernizing has allowed the company to be more reactive to market
changes
- 34% say legacy modernization has accelerated digital transformation projects

About three-quarters of leaders said they have started a modernization program but
failed to complete it"

Can that "almost 100%" claim be true? I confess that three out of my last three clients
are talking about eliminating the mainframe, but I supposed it to be an anomaly. Maybe the survey
used the word "modernize" and the author ~assumed~ this must mean dropping the mainframe.

The article also says "Mainframes are still critical to business operations with 71%
of the Fortune 500 depending on these machines, including 92 of the world's 100 largest
banks". Come on - she's telling us that almost ~all~ of those companies intend to
switch legacy applications to the cloud? I just can't buy that. ~My~ bank had certainly
better not be planning such a move.

---
Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313

/* If a problem has a single neck, it has a simple solution. */

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Re: [External] Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 9:21 AM Lionel B Dyck  wrote:

> Y'all stop using logic and reason - this is an emotional issue that the
> author and others are invested in and has nothing to do with IBM
> effectively telling the world that the mainframe is dead based on all the
> layoffs that have occurred over the last 20-25 years, or that IBM continues
> to offload software development or outright sells IBM software to other
> companies, or that IBM has bought into the Cloud and has reduced their
> investment in developing z/OS, or . . . .
>
> And then there is the vast amounts of money to be made by replacing a
> mainframe - I'm sure that those vendors offering those services only have
> the best interests of the current mainframe users at heart.
>
> It's Beta vs VHS all over again
>

Beta lost due to marketing idiocy. It was superior to VHS, technically, but
"overpriced" compared to VHS. So the consumer went with the inferior but
more affordable VHS. You're right -- exactly like z/OS vs. Windows and
zSeries vs. AMD/Intel.



>
> Lionel B. Dyck <
> Website: https://www.lbdsoftware.com


-- 
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Maranatha! <><
John McKown

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Re: [External] Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 9:19 AM Seymour J Metz  wrote:

> Is that like the eternal ax (that handle has been changed 20 times and the
> blade 30 times, but it's still the same ax)?
>

Or like I read in one book: "I've only had one drink. It's been topped off
20 times. But it's only one drink." Or more like a military organization.
The U.K Coldstream Guards has been in existence since 1650. Lots of
different commanders and soldiers. But the same regiment.



>
>
> --
> Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
> http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3
>
> 
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf
> of Pommier, Rex [rpomm...@sfgmembers.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 9:59 AM
> To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
> Subject: Re: [External] Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"
>
> Maybe based on their "logic", my z14 is 30 years old because we're running
> an application on it that was written in the late 80s.  Never mind that it
> has been maintained for the past 30+ years, since we can find 30 year old
> code in the application, the entire thing must be 30+ years old.
>
> Rex
>
> -Original Message-
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List  On Behalf
> Of Peter Bishop
> Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 7:24 AM
> To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
> Subject: [External] Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"
>
> Interesting re 2):
>
> "The survey found that organizations are running an average of four
> mainframes with an average age of 17 years. Sixty-four percent are running
> mainframes between 10 and 20 years old, with 28% running machines that are
> 20 to 30 years old. "
>
> So 2/7 are running machines over 20+ years old?  And 2/3 over 10 years?
> What does that even mean?  Smells fishy to me.  What is the sample size?
> Is it biased somehow?
>
> Cheers,
> Peter
>
> On 9/06/2020 10:02 pm, Bob Bridges wrote:
> > A coworker just sent me this brief article.
> >
> >
> https://secure-web.cisco.com/1JN9E1bGCX8mpl6qPkrSEev2O0fNt81naiQJbFUhhlGtqM9bJimsEWYFVu_WWDFv8b1LEShSbIYjTypvbccq0QTe8fSSnqtPTlIl5WSobiXufZ6TbWYqAd2zB6QnAJclJP_rAf4DgxXIypS7ymmvlkSe5TWlyy0y-0iLJVkpBun7o0cLqD4cYGunrKLpI9mR7jXtQTEW5mFdkn4ebl587wTx_Mz8k7HoG9dO1TptQ9A5akIhDp4Cvmz46L8Nvm7qca8D7I2KGd5alIDSNBefZDXYOIDnU14SegaPCQ5ON9WE8lD77ARJjrfke6SFteYf1D9CilsWGSdey--UR8R4B30tUGtIG2gflxGCGCckkwQdiMhCYFTxxVKpuXNl8glorWalBxAVso0bIdzEn7xAtz-0iemamNd1GxIAswPave4LokMoaE1c8NYBjr-kWaGaB/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.techrepublic.com%2Farticle%2Feveryone-wants-to-retire-mainfram
> > es-but-74-of-modernization-efforts-fail/
> >
> > I'm interested in two aspects of this:
> >
> > 1) The writer uses the word "modernization" quite a bit, and as far as I
> can tell she uses it, without explanation, to mean "switching from
> mainframes to more recently invented platforms".  This is the old
> assumption we've talked about recently.
> >
> > 2) There's a really surprising number in there:
> >
> > "...almost 100% of survey respondents plan to move legacy applications
> to the cloud this year and the motivation to move is clear:
> >
> > - 60% strongly agree they will be left behind competitively if they
> > fail to modernize
> > - 33% say modernizing has allowed the company to be more reactive to
> > market changes
> > - 34% say legacy modernization has accelerated digital transformation
> > projects
> >
> > About three-quarters of leaders said they have started a modernization
> program but failed to complete it"
> >
> > Can that "almost 100%" claim be true?  I confess that three out of my
> last three clients are talking about eliminating the mainframe, but I
> supposed it to be an anomaly.  Maybe the survey used the word "modernize"
> and the author ~assumed~ this must mean dropping the mainframe.
> >
> > The article also says "Mainframes are still critical to business
> operations with 71% of the Fortune 500 depending on these machines,
> including 92 of the world's 100 largest banks".  Come on - she's telling us
> that almost ~all~ of those companies intend to switch legacy applications
> to the cloud?  I just can't buy that.  ~My~ bank had certainly better not
> be planning such a move.
> >
> > ---
> > Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313
> >
> > /* If a problem has a single neck, it has a simple solution. */
> >
> > --
> > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send
> > email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
>
&

Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-09 Thread R.S.

Regarding 100% customers:
- Did you think about replatforming?
- Yes.
(OK, another one on the list)
- And what?
- And concluded it would be very stupid idea. We did the analysis and we
know that.

Another explanation:
Mainframe shops are sometimes big companies. It is very likely to find
an idiot in large group. Ask the idiot, note his responses. Is the idiot
the person who decide? Well...
It is also somehow likely to find out a person who think Churchill,
Roosevelt and Stalin were soccer players.

--
Radoslaw Skorupka
Lodz, Poland

W dniu 09.06.2020 o 14:02, Bob Bridges pisze:

A coworker just sent me this brief article.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/everyone-wants-to-retire-mainframes-but-74-of-modernization-efforts-fail/

I'm interested in two aspects of this:

2) There's a really surprising number in there:

"...almost 100% of survey respondents plan to move legacy applications to the
cloud this year and the motivation to move is clear:

About three-quarters of leaders said they have started a modernization program but
failed to complete it"

---
Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313

/* If a problem has a single neck, it has a simple solution. */

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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"

2020-06-09 Thread Joe Monk

What do you think about paved roads? Theyre something else, huh? Nice and
smooth...

Joe

On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 9:41 AM Seymour J Metz  wrote:

> How long has your company been using electricity? Time to modernize.
>
> Yes, I know that you've replaced the wiring three times and have solar
> power on your roof, but it's still the same obsolete electricity.
>
>
> --
> Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
> http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3
>
> 
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf
> of R.S. [r.skoru...@bremultibank.com.pl]
> Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 10:35 AM
> To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
> Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"
>
> W dniu 09.06.2020 o 14:24, Peter Bishop pisze:
> > Interesting re 2):
> >
> > "The survey found that organizations are running an average of four
> > mainframes with an average age of 17 years. Sixty-four percent are
> > running mainframes between 10 and 20 years old, with 28% running
> > machines that are 20 to 30 years old. "
> >
> > So 2/7 are running machines over 20+ years old?  And 2/3 over 10
> > years?  What does that even mean?  Smells fishy to me.  What is the
> > sample size?  Is it biased somehow?
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Peter
>
> It can be understood as how long the company is using mainframe, not how
> old is the currently used CPC.
> Of course mainframe is old, obsolete, expensive... blah, blah, blah...
>
>
> --
> Radoslaw Skorupka
> Lodz, Poland
>
>
>
>
>
> ==
>
> Jeśli nie jesteś adresatem tej wiadomości:
>
> - powiadom nas o tym w mailu zwrotnym (dziękujemy!),
> - usuń trwale tę wiadomość (i wszystkie kopie, które wydrukowałeś lub
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> Wiadomość ta może zawierać chronione prawem informacje, które może
> wykorzystać tylko adresat.Przypominamy, że każdy, kto rozpowszechnia
> (kopiuje, rozprowadza) tę wiadomość lub podejmuje podobne działania,
> narusza prawo i może podlegać karze.
>
> mBank S.A. z siedzibą w Warszawie, ul. Senatorska 18, 00-950 Warszawa,
> http://secure-web.cisco.com/1fweH3hW6JwpfA1BxzPSBmm-WkVTANCmc6rFRK7QRpvY86fnb3PXJgmZVxpaHo9aiOfxJH54mINVlA9th-bP8Eu-laZ_a1NfFSO_gQNmLx3xNiJhx9n_qoxpD1cCNZfNO920Tqxbqq-4GS3C30F_l0jx3yKLKN9g0EssIwtsjSRoKWa_9lYIpQdxkTwP8oCCgd2JPGa4Z-r4D89-_QriOKTzIeRPNAujA4UjybaKA771z-ad9BBlkDqr8N_V-_8qE2mpt-JFaxraHSX5CQ4yUSUPQ4OVQQb2BRSA6bOo_-YtEsMvtRUkLV193ZGgf47dV7t4J2rRT9vBN3m3eHEZr6mRN6p5V7QF3nftQ4hSZ0vhpHcCxxtYES-pvoDd452wqkIv5kVI0C5YmB5DJzW_n0GGhtIIis6yzHcSCFtCxD3GjjlEpe8Rys5sn1d5KFh_-/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mBank.pl,
> e-mail: kont...@mbank.pl. Sąd Rejonowy dla m. st. Warszawy XII Wydział
> Gospodarczy Krajowego Rejestru Sądowego, KRS 025237, NIP:
> 526-021-50-88. Kapitał zakładowy (opłacony w całości) według stanu na
> 01.01.2020 r. wynosi 169.401.468 złotych.
>
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> e-mail: kont...@mbank.pl. District Court for the Capital City of Warsaw,
> 12th Commercial Division of the National Court Register, KRS 025237,
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Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes"