Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?]

[Joel C. Ewing]

On 12/03/2015 12:16 PM, Paul Gilmartin wrote:
> On Thu, 3 Dec 2015 10:43:38 -0600, Joel C. Ewing wrote:
>> ...  Because DOS/VS had native support for source and object
>> libraries, those were kept online, but there was no decent native
>> support to effectively submit production job JCL from libraries ...
>>
> Astonishing.  You could RYO editor but not RYO "SUBMIT".
OLE' was envisioned and implemented by one person, James Stevens, the
head of Tech Services at a time when it was a one or two man operation
(I raised the body count to 3) -- he probably created OLE' as late night
entertainment for his own convenience and benefit to make development of
his Mini-Task on-line environment and other utilities less tedious.  It
went company-wide since it significantly improved the efficiency of 40+
programmers versus fiddling with individual cards in a deck.  JCL didn't
get changed as much and Operator's time was considered less valuable;
and since they only picked up the entire job deck and moved it around 
as a unit it wasn't that obvious that a significant amount of time would
be saved by avoiding the use of decks for production JCL. 

OLE' did have the ability to submit jobs to DOS, but the interactive
OLE' work areas assigned to individual users were each a pre-defined
number of "pages" of 24 80-byte records and the total size of all areas
was constrained by the capacity of a 3330. With those space constraints,
the normal practice was to keep in one's OLE' area(s) only data actively
being edited along with some shorter job streams used for testing and
development.  It would have been possible to submit a short batch job
from OLE' to extract a production job stream from a source library and
load it into part of the an OLE' area (as was done for source code
editing), wait for that job to run, and then submit the production job
from OLE'; but by the time an Operator had done that they could have
already loaded a physical deck.  There just didn't seem to be enough
cost-benefit to justify converting JCL from cards to DASD until MVS
changed the equation.
>
>> ... and the
>> company was averse to spending on "unneeded" additional software, so
>> production JCL was created in OLE' but punched and kept on cards for use
>> by Operations.
>>
> The supplies must have been cheap.
My impression was that the volume of new cards was low enough to be a
trivial cost compared to the cost of printer paper, and I never saw a
card filing cabinet wear out.  Maintenance on the card reader/punch
became more of a nuisance and issue after the units aged at least a
decade, but the cost of that was a minor part of the hardware
maintenance contract.
>
>> When we started DOS/VSE to MVS/XA migration in 1985, we were already
>> running the maximum of four, shared-SPOOL DOS/VSE systems under VM ...
>>
> Was that limit imposed by VM or by the DOS/VSE shared spool?  I'd
> suspect the latter.
>
> -- gil
>
Definitely was not a VM limitation.  DOS/VSE had a shared "lock" file to
coordinate library and other inter-system sharing and that file could be
shared by a maximum of four systems (and with four systems one did at
times see performance problems with that drive).  I can't remember at
this point whether the SPOOLER ("POWER"), was limited to four systems
for shared spool because it depended on the "lock" file or whether it
had its own internal design limits as well.

-- 
Joel C. Ewing,Bentonville, AR   jcew...@acm.org 

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Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?]

[Barry Merrill]

At Purdue University, in 1965, the Share Programming Library (might not be
quite
right name) card decks filled cabinets that were 6 feet tall and about 40
feet
of wall space.  These were the contributed programs and subroutines
available to
all SHARE members.  I can't recall if they were automatically send or had to
be
requested, but I think all possible card decks were in those cabinets.

Barry


Herbert W. "Barry" Merrill, PhD
President-Programmer
MXG Software
Merrill Consultants
10717 Cromwell Drive
Dallas, TX 75229-5112
ba...@mxg.com
Fax:  214 350 3694 - Still works, received as email
Tel:  214 351 1966 - Unreliable, please use email

www.mxg.comHomePage: FAQ answers most questions
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-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
Behalf Of Joel C. Ewing
Sent: Thursday, December 03, 2015 10:44 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to
determine hardware architecture level?]

On 12/02/2015 11:09 PM, Ed Gould wrote:
> On Dec 2, 2015, at 2:58 PM, Joel C. Ewing wrote:
>
>> I just weighed the one almost-full box of some old programs and data 
>> cards that I have retained for show-and-tell over the years, and it 
>> is a little over 8 lbs.  Since the cards have holes punched, have 
>> some lighter cardboard spacers, and new cards pack more tightly, I 
>> would estimate 10 lbs as a better approximation for a box of 2000 
>> unused cards.
>>
>> Before we started conversion from DOS/VSE to MVS in 1985, all our 
>> production JCL was on cards in several card filing cabinets.  My 
>> recollection is that a cabinet drawer could hold around two boxes of 
>> cards, so the maximum capacity of one cabinet might have been on the 
>> order of 40 boxes of cards.  We could easily have had somewhere in 
>> the neighborhood of 0.5 - 1.0 tons of cards containing JCL.  A larger 
>> shop might literally have had several tons of JCL.
>> Joel C. Ewing
>
>
> Joel:
> Interesting. I have never worked in a shop (last say 45 years) where 
> there was that much punched cards. There were some cases where the 
> programmer submitted boxes of cards for one time update to a source 
> lib and maybe 5 or so JCL cards. Production was similar one or two job 
> cards a joblib and exec and then probably either a /* or // card.
>
> None of the shops I have ever worked in used that much JCL PERIOD.
>
> This does not include a very few jobs that had "data" cards mind you.
> Those types of jobs were rare and were handled as a card to tape on 
> the dos side and used a tape on the MFT/MVT side.
>
> Ed
>
>
When I came on-board in 1978,  all program development and maintenance and
test job submission, except for one or two Luddite-programmer holdouts who
still edited source decks,  was done from IBM 3277's using a home-grown
On-Line Editor (OLE') system running under a home-grown multi-tasking
("Mini-Task") interactive environment, which supported multiple interactive
on-line applications in a single DOS/VS job partition.  Because DOS/VS had
native support for source and object libraries, those were kept online, but
there was no decent native support to effectively submit production job JCL
from libraries and the company was averse to spending on "unneeded"
additional software, so production JCL was created in OLE' but punched and
kept on cards for use by Operations. 

At one time the company had been a service bureau.  That was no longer the
case when I arrived -- by then it was just the DP subsidiary of Arkansas
Best Corp -- but they continued to support and do processing for former
service-bureau customers who chose to stay.  That meant, for example, that
there might be many different payroll, accounts payable, accounts
receivable, etc.  JCL job decks executing essentially the same programs but
with different parameters and files.  So our ratio of JCL images to program
source images might have been higher than typical.

When we started DOS/VSE to MVS/XA migration in 1985, we were already running
the maximum of four, shared-SPOOL DOS/VSE systems under VM and all on-line
applications had by then been converted to run under CICS. 
We converted to VM/XA  (I think still called "VM Migration Aid" at the
time) to also support MVS/XA.  As primary technical support for MVS, the
very  first "production" application I created under MVS was to set up a
TSO/ISPF application to allow operators to submit DOS production JCL from an
efficiently-blocked MVS PDS library under MVS using an MVS VM virtual card
punch feeding a DOS VM virtual card reader.  Not only did that finally
eliminate all the cabinets with JCL card decks, but it made all production
JCL easily accessible for analysis and conversion during the subsequent
migration process.

Without further empirical data points to 

Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?]

[Joel C. Ewing]

On 12/02/2015 11:09 PM, Ed Gould wrote:
> On Dec 2, 2015, at 2:58 PM, Joel C. Ewing wrote:
>
>> I just weighed the one almost-full box of some old programs and data
>> cards that I have retained for show-and-tell over the years, and it is a
>> little over 8 lbs.  Since the cards have holes punched, have some
>> lighter cardboard spacers, and new cards pack more tightly, I would
>> estimate 10 lbs as a better approximation for a box of 2000 unused
>> cards.
>>
>> Before we started conversion from DOS/VSE to MVS in 1985, all our
>> production JCL was on cards in several card filing cabinets.  My
>> recollection is that a cabinet drawer could hold around two boxes of
>> cards, so the maximum capacity of one cabinet might have been on the
>> order of 40 boxes of cards.  We could easily have had somewhere in the
>> neighborhood of 0.5 - 1.0 tons of cards containing JCL.  A larger shop
>> might literally have had several tons of JCL.
>> Joel C. Ewing
>
>
> Joel:
> Interesting. I have never worked in a shop (last say 45 years) where
> there was that much punched cards. There were some cases where the
> programmer submitted boxes of cards for one time update to a source
> lib and maybe 5 or so JCL cards. Production was similar one or two job
> cards a joblib and exec and then probably either a /* or // card.
>
> None of the shops I have ever worked in used that much JCL PERIOD.
>
> This does not include a very few jobs that had "data" cards mind you.
> Those types of jobs were rare and were handled as a card to tape on
> the dos side and used a tape on the MFT/MVT side.
>
> Ed
>
>
When I came on-board in 1978,  all program development and maintenance
and test job submission, except for one or two Luddite-programmer
holdouts who still edited source decks,  was done from IBM 3277's using
a home-grown On-Line Editor (OLE') system running under a home-grown
multi-tasking ("Mini-Task") interactive environment, which supported
multiple interactive on-line applications in a single DOS/VS job
partition.  Because DOS/VS had native support for source and object
libraries, those were kept online, but there was no decent native
support to effectively submit production job JCL from libraries and the
company was averse to spending on "unneeded" additional software, so
production JCL was created in OLE' but punched and kept on cards for use
by Operations. 

At one time the company had been a service bureau.  That was no longer
the case when I arrived -- by then it was just the DP subsidiary of
Arkansas Best Corp -- but they continued to support and do processing
for former service-bureau customers who chose to stay.  That meant, for
example, that there might be many different payroll, accounts payable,
accounts receivable, etc.  JCL job decks executing essentially the same
programs but with different parameters and files.  So our ratio of JCL
images to program source images might have been higher than typical.

When we started DOS/VSE to MVS/XA migration in 1985, we were already
running the maximum of four, shared-SPOOL DOS/VSE systems under VM and
all on-line applications had by then been converted to run under CICS. 
We converted to VM/XA  (I think still called "VM Migration Aid" at the
time) to also support MVS/XA.  As primary technical support for MVS, the
very  first "production" application I created under MVS was to set up a
TSO/ISPF application to allow operators to submit DOS production JCL
from an efficiently-blocked MVS PDS library under MVS using an MVS VM
virtual card punch feeding a DOS VM virtual card reader.  Not only did
that finally eliminate all the cabinets with JCL card decks, but it made
all production JCL easily accessible for analysis and conversion during
the subsequent migration process.

Without further empirical data points to establish the typical effect on
weight of the average holes per card I guess a more precise conversion
factor isn't possible, but it appears the likely bounds at this point are
1 ton JCL cards ~= 400,000 to 666,666  80-byte JCL images.

-- 
Joel C. Ewing,Bentonville, AR   jcew...@acm.org 

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Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?]

[Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)]

In <028001d12dea$d995b7c0$8cc12740$@mxg.com>, on 12/03/2015
   at 10:51 AM, Barry Merrill  said:

>I can't recall if they were automatically send

You had to order what you wanted.


 
-- 
 Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
 ISO position; see  
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)

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Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?]

[Paul Gilmartin]

On Thu, 3 Dec 2015 10:43:38 -0600, Joel C. Ewing wrote:
>
>...  Because DOS/VS had native support for source and object
>libraries, those were kept online, but there was no decent native
>support to effectively submit production job JCL from libraries ...
>
Astonishing.  You could RYO editor but not RYO "SUBMIT".

>... and the
>company was averse to spending on "unneeded" additional software, so
>production JCL was created in OLE' but punched and kept on cards for use
>by Operations.
> 
The supplies must have been cheap.

>When we started DOS/VSE to MVS/XA migration in 1985, we were already
>running the maximum of four, shared-SPOOL DOS/VSE systems under VM ...
> 
Was that limit imposed by VM or by the DOS/VSE shared spool?  I'd
suspect the latter.

-- gil

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Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?]

[Paul Gilmartin]

On Wed, 2 Dec 2015 10:02:01 -0600, Dana Mitchell wrote:

>On Tue, 1 Dec 2015 23:03:59 +, J O Skip Robinson wrote:
>
>>(This whole season feels like Friday.) A doughnut, on the other hand, 
>>requires the hole for its very definition. The hole supplies no mass or 
>>nutritional value, but without it the thing is not a doughnut. By contrast a 
>>punch card requires the solid part to give the holes meaning; they would 
>>otherwise collapse into gibberish. 
>
>In school we verified that if you multi-punch every possible punch out of a 
>card, the result is indeed very fragile.  But it was fun to dupe
> 
This could inspire a Retro engineering project:  Given the constraint of 
required mechanical
strength, devise an encoding that maximizes information density.  Akin to GCR:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_code_recording

(How much does the hole diminish the mechanical strength of the bagel?)

-- gil

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Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?]

[Dana Mitchell]

On Tue, 1 Dec 2015 23:03:59 +, J O Skip Robinson  
wrote:

>(This whole season feels like Friday.) A doughnut, on the other hand, requires 
>the hole for its very definition. The hole supplies no mass or nutritional 
>value, but without it the thing is not a doughnut. By contrast a punch card 
>requires the solid part to give the holes meaning; they would otherwise 
>collapse into gibberish. 
>

In school we verified that if you multi-punch every possible punch out of a 
card, the result is indeed very fragile.  But it was fun to dupe

Dana

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Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?]

[J O Skip Robinson]

One urban legend (not necessarily fiction) is an explanation for the curious 
layout in EBCDIC coding. We have

A - I as C1 - C9
J - R as D1 - D9
S - Z as E2 - E9

Of course there is one more hex value in the neighborhood than there are 
letters in English, but why jump from D9 to E2 instead of using E1 - E8? The 
story I heard in computer school is that the EBCDIC ultimately derived from the 
punch card layout. To represent a letter, a card required both a 'zone' punch 
in one of the first three rows at the top plus a 'digit' punch further down in 
the same column. The first group of letters used the top zone row and so on 
through the alphabet. The last group of letters worked off the third zone row. 
The story goes that early punch equipment and card stock were imprecise and 
flimsy. In order to avoid having to deal with two vertically adjacent 
punches--third zone row plus first digit row--the code was constructed to skip 
the 1 digit for the letter S. Since a gap was needed anyhow, this was the ideal 
place for it. 

I love this story too much to challenge it.  

.
.
.
J.O.Skip Robinson
Southern California Edison Company
Electric Dragon Team Paddler 
SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager
626-302-7535 Office
323-715-0595 Mobile
jo.skip.robin...@sce.com

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of Paul Gilmartin
Sent: Wednesday, December 02, 2015 8:34 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: (External):Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to 
determine hardware architecture level?]

On Wed, 2 Dec 2015 10:02:01 -0600, Dana Mitchell wrote:

>On Tue, 1 Dec 2015 23:03:59 +, J O Skip Robinson wrote:
>
>>(This whole season feels like Friday.) A doughnut, on the other hand, 
>>requires the hole for its very definition. The hole supplies no mass or 
>>nutritional value, but without it the thing is not a doughnut. By contrast a 
>>punch card requires the solid part to give the holes meaning; they would 
>>otherwise collapse into gibberish. 
>
>In school we verified that if you multi-punch every possible punch out 
>of a card, the result is indeed very fragile.  But it was fun to dupe
> 
This could inspire a Retro engineering project:  Given the constraint of 
required mechanical strength, devise an encoding that maximizes information 
density.  Akin to GCR:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_code_recording

(How much does the hole diminish the mechanical strength of the bagel?)

-- gil


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Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?]

[Doug]

Everyone pull that Write Punch and Silver patches and a box of cards..Grins

.

On Dec 2, 2015, at 12:33, J O Skip Robinson  wrote:

One urban legend (not necessarily fiction) is an explanation for the curious 
layout in EBCDIC coding. We have

A - I as C1 - C9
J - R as D1 - D9
S - Z as E2 - E9

Of course there is one more hex value in the neighborhood than there are 
letters in English, but why jump from D9 to E2 instead of using E1 - E8? The 
story I heard in computer school is that the EBCDIC ultimately derived from the 
punch card layout. To represent a letter, a card required both a 'zone' punch 
in one of the first three rows at the top plus a 'digit' punch further down in 
the same column. The first group of letters used the top zone row and so on 
through the alphabet. The last group of letters worked off the third zone row. 
The story goes that early punch equipment and card stock were imprecise and 
flimsy. In order to avoid having to deal with two vertically adjacent 
punches--third zone row plus first digit row--the code was constructed to skip 
the 1 digit for the letter S. Since a gap was needed anyhow, this was the ideal 
place for it. 

I love this story too much to challenge it.  

.
.
.
J.O.Skip Robinson
Southern California Edison Company
Electric Dragon Team Paddler 
SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager
626-302-7535 Office
323-715-0595 Mobile
jo.skip.robin...@sce.com

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of Paul Gilmartin
Sent: Wednesday, December 02, 2015 8:34 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: (External):Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to 
determine hardware architecture level?]

> On Wed, 2 Dec 2015 10:02:01 -0600, Dana Mitchell wrote:
> 
>> On Tue, 1 Dec 2015 23:03:59 +, J O Skip Robinson wrote:
>> 
>> (This whole season feels like Friday.) A doughnut, on the other hand, 
>> requires the hole for its very definition. The hole supplies no mass or 
>> nutritional value, but without it the thing is not a doughnut. By contrast a 
>> punch card requires the solid part to give the holes meaning; they would 
>> otherwise collapse into gibberish. 
> 
> In school we verified that if you multi-punch every possible punch out 
> of a card, the result is indeed very fragile.  But it was fun to dupe
> 
This could inspire a Retro engineering project:  Given the constraint of 
required mechanical strength, devise an encoding that maximizes information 
density.  Akin to GCR:

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_code_recording

(How much does the hole diminish the mechanical strength of the bagel?)

-- gil


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Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?]

[Joel C. Ewing]

I just weighed the one almost-full box of some old programs and data
cards that I have retained for show-and-tell over the years, and it is a
little over 8 lbs.  Since the cards have holes punched, have some
lighter cardboard spacers, and new cards pack more tightly, I would
estimate 10 lbs as a better approximation for a box of 2000 unused cards.

Before we started conversion from DOS/VSE to MVS in 1985, all our
production JCL was on cards in several card filing cabinets.  My
recollection is that a cabinet drawer could hold around two boxes of
cards, so the maximum capacity of one cabinet might have been on the
order of 40 boxes of cards.  We could easily have had somewhere in the
neighborhood of 0.5 - 1.0 tons of cards containing JCL.  A larger shop
might literally have had several tons of JCL.
Joel C. Ewing

On 12/01/2015 02:41 PM, Barry Merrill wrote:
> I think a box of 2000 IBM cards is on the order of 6 pounds,
> so a TON of JCL cards would be 333 boxes, or about 666,666
> card images.
>
> But, the useful weight is zero, since we only use the holes.
>
> Barry
>
>
> Herbert W. "Barry" Merrill, PhD
> President-Programmer
> MXG Software
> Merrill Consultants
> 10717 Cromwell Drive
> Dallas, TX 75229-5112
> ba...@mxg.com
> Fax:  214 350 3694 - Still works, received as email
> Tel:  214 351 1966 - Unreliable, please use email
>
> www.mxg.comHomePage: FAQ answers most questions
> ad...@mxg.com  License Forms, Invoice, Payment, ftp information
> supp...@mxg.comTechnical Issues 
> MXG-L FREE ListServer  http://www.mxg.com/mxg-l_listserver/
>
>
>
> -Original Message-
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
> Behalf Of Farley, Peter x23353
> Sent: Tuesday, December 01, 2015 1:59 PM
> To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
> Subject: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine
> hardware architecture level?]
>
> Re: "ton" of JCL, at least one large shop of my prior acquaintance (20 or so
> years ago) had over 250,000 members in the production applications JCL
> libraries.
>
> Not sure how much of that was obsolete at the time, but the batch operations
> control product they used had vast quantities of data as well.
>
> I think that counts as a "ton" or 2 . . . :)
>
> Peter
>
> -Original Message-
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
> Behalf Of Peter Relson
> Sent: Tuesday, December 01, 2015 9:30 AM
> To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
> Subject: Re: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?
>
> 
>
> . . . migrating from Cobol 4 to Cobol 5 without changing a ton of JCL (how
> much JCL is a "ton" anyway?).
>
> --


-- 
Joel C. Ewing,Bentonville, AR   jcew...@acm.org 

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Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?]

[Ward, Mike S]

Yea, you still have to feed the punch. :)

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of Kirk Wolf
Sent: Tuesday, December 01, 2015 5:44 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine 
hardware architecture level?]

On Tue, Dec 1, 2015 at 2:41 PM, Barry Merrill  wrote:

> I think a box of 2000 IBM cards is on the order of 6 pounds, so a TON 
> of JCL cards would be 333 boxes, or about 666,666 card images.
>
> But, the useful weight is zero, since we only use the holes.
>
> Barry
>
> 
Since this is a thread well suited to reminiscence, I will relay this story.

My father managed a very large IBM data center in the 70's.   Huge floor
space, and a very large room to store blank punched cards.
One of the systems programmers who worked there was a cranky joke-ster.
He would read every month in the company newsletter about monetary employee 
suggestion awards handed out for suggestions that he thought were silly and 
banal.

Like:
- there is an extra phone on some desk that is not needed
- unnecessary copies of some large daily report were being printed
- 

The companies policy was that employee suggestions would be reviewed, first by 
corporate, and then by the line manager in charge of implementation.
The employee would get a cash award based on some percentage of the first 
year's savings.

My father gets a call one day from a very excited guy in corporate.
He says that this systems programmer has submitted a suggestion that will save 
many tens of thousands of dollars a year in the data center.
The suggestion was something like:

=
We store millions of blank punched cards so that they are available when needed 
for the data center.

I have designed and written two assembler programs (see listings attached) that 
allow us to eliminate this storage requirement.

- The first program allows us to read and store a "master image" of a single 
blank punched card, electronically, on spinning magnetic disk.

- The second program can be run, whenever needed, to punch out blank cards from 
the image stored on disk.  A parameter card specifies the count of how many 
blank cards to punch.

...
=

My father had to gently explain to the corporate guy how he had been suckered.

Cheers,

Kirk Wolf
Dovetailed Technologies
http://dovetail.com

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Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?]

[Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)]

In
,
on 12/01/2015
   at 10:51 PM, Mike Schwab  said:

>Or a small flash drive of 64M to 2G.

Are they still making those?
 
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Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?]

[Ed Gould]

On Dec 2, 2015, at 2:58 PM, Joel C. Ewing wrote:


I just weighed the one almost-full box of some old programs and data
cards that I have retained for show-and-tell over the years, and it  
is a

little over 8 lbs.  Since the cards have holes punched, have some
lighter cardboard spacers, and new cards pack more tightly, I would
estimate 10 lbs as a better approximation for a box of 2000 unused  
cards.


Before we started conversion from DOS/VSE to MVS in 1985, all our
production JCL was on cards in several card filing cabinets.  My
recollection is that a cabinet drawer could hold around two boxes of
cards, so the maximum capacity of one cabinet might have been on the
order of 40 boxes of cards.  We could easily have had somewhere in the
neighborhood of 0.5 - 1.0 tons of cards containing JCL.  A larger shop
might literally have had several tons of JCL.
Joel C. Ewing



Joel:
Interesting. I have never worked in a shop (last say 45 years) where  
there was that much punched cards. There were some cases where the  
programmer submitted boxes of cards for one time update to a source  
lib and maybe 5 or so JCL cards. Production was similar one or two  
job cards a joblib and exec and then probably either a /* or // card.


None of the shops I have ever worked in used that much JCL PERIOD.

This does not include a very few jobs that had "data" cards mind you.  
Those types of jobs were rare and were handled as a card to tape on  
the dos side and used a tape on the MFT/MVT side.


Ed

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Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?]

[Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)]

In
,
on 12/02/2015
   at 05:33 PM, J O Skip Robinson  said:

>One urban legend (not necessarily fiction) is an explanation for the
>curious layout in EBCDIC coding.

UL? It's well documented. See, e.g., IBM System/360 Principles of
Operation, A22-6821-7[1], Appendix F, USASCII-8 and EBCDIC Charts, p.
150.2

>Of course there is one more hex value in the neighborhood than 
>there are letters in English, but why jump from D9 to E2 instead 
>of using E1 - E8? The story I heard in computer school is that the
>EBCDIC ultimately derived from the punch card layout.

As is implicit in the name, EBCDIC derives from BCD, which in turn
derive from the card encodings.

[1]
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/360/princOps/A22-6821-7_360PrincOpsDec67.pdf
 
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Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?]

[Barry Merrill]

I think a box of 2000 IBM cards is on the order of 6 pounds,
so a TON of JCL cards would be 333 boxes, or about 666,666
card images.

But, the useful weight is zero, since we only use the holes.

Barry


Herbert W. "Barry" Merrill, PhD
President-Programmer
MXG Software
Merrill Consultants
10717 Cromwell Drive
Dallas, TX 75229-5112
ba...@mxg.com
Fax:  214 350 3694 - Still works, received as email
Tel:  214 351 1966 - Unreliable, please use email

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-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
Behalf Of Farley, Peter x23353
Sent: Tuesday, December 01, 2015 1:59 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine
hardware architecture level?]

Re: "ton" of JCL, at least one large shop of my prior acquaintance (20 or so
years ago) had over 250,000 members in the production applications JCL
libraries.

Not sure how much of that was obsolete at the time, but the batch operations
control product they used had vast quantities of data as well.

I think that counts as a "ton" or 2 . . . :)

Peter

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
Behalf Of Peter Relson
Sent: Tuesday, December 01, 2015 9:30 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?



. . . migrating from Cobol 4 to Cobol 5 without changing a ton of JCL (how
much JCL is a "ton" anyway?).

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Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?]

[Paul Gilmartin]

On Tue, 1 Dec 2015 14:41:58 -0600, Barry Merrill wrote:

>I think a box of 2000 IBM cards is on the order of 6 pounds,
>so a TON of JCL cards would be 333 boxes, or about 666,666
>card images.
>
>But, the useful weight is zero, since we only use the holes.
> 
But as XKCD once said, "Four boxes of punch cards ought to be enough for 
anyone."

https://what-if.xkcd.com/63/

My memory of carrying around file trays (3, IIRC, when I was younger) is "more".

A little Googling says 2.42 g/card.  WAG, I think.

But you could keep it on micro SD cards.

-- gil

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Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?]

[J O Skip Robinson]

(This whole season feels like Friday.) A doughnut, on the other hand, requires 
the hole for its very definition. The hole supplies no mass or nutritional 
value, but without it the thing is not a doughnut. By contrast a punch card 
requires the solid part to give the holes meaning; they would otherwise 
collapse into gibberish. 

.
.
.
J.O.Skip Robinson
Southern California Edison Company
Electric Dragon Team Paddler 
SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager
626-302-7535 Office
323-715-0595 Mobile
jo.skip.robin...@sce.com

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of Barry Merrill
Sent: Tuesday, December 01, 2015 12:42 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: (External):Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to 
determine hardware architecture level?]

I think a box of 2000 IBM cards is on the order of 6 pounds, so a TON of JCL 
cards would be 333 boxes, or about 666,666 card images.

But, the useful weight is zero, since we only use the holes.

Barry


Herbert W. "Barry" Merrill, PhD
President-Programmer
MXG Software
Merrill Consultants
10717 Cromwell Drive
Dallas, TX 75229-5112
ba...@mxg.com
Fax:  214 350 3694 - Still works, received as email
Tel:  214 351 1966 - Unreliable, please use email

www.mxg.comHomePage: FAQ answers most questions
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-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of Farley, Peter x23353
Sent: Tuesday, December 01, 2015 1:59 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine 
hardware architecture level?]

Re: "ton" of JCL, at least one large shop of my prior acquaintance (20 or so 
years ago) had over 250,000 members in the production applications JCL 
libraries.

Not sure how much of that was obsolete at the time, but the batch operations 
control product they used had vast quantities of data as well.

I think that counts as a "ton" or 2 . . . :)

Peter

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of Peter Relson
Sent: Tuesday, December 01, 2015 9:30 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?



. . . migrating from Cobol 4 to Cobol 5 without changing a ton of JCL (how much 
JCL is a "ton" anyway?).

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Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?]

[Kirk Wolf]

On Tue, Dec 1, 2015 at 2:41 PM, Barry Merrill  wrote:

> I think a box of 2000 IBM cards is on the order of 6 pounds,
> so a TON of JCL cards would be 333 boxes, or about 666,666
> card images.
>
> But, the useful weight is zero, since we only use the holes.
>
> Barry
>
> 
Since this is a thread well suited to reminiscence, I will relay this story.

My father managed a very large IBM data center in the 70's.   Huge floor
space, and a very large room to store blank punched cards.
One of the systems programmers who worked there was a cranky joke-ster.
He would read every month in the company newsletter about monetary employee
suggestion awards handed out for suggestions that he thought were silly and
banal.

Like:
- there is an extra phone on some desk that is not needed
- unnecessary copies of some large daily report were being printed
- 

The companies policy was that employee suggestions would be reviewed, first
by corporate, and then by the line manager in charge of implementation.
The employee would get a cash award based on some percentage of the first
year's savings.

My father gets a call one day from a very excited guy in corporate.
He says that this systems programmer has submitted a suggestion that will
save many tens of thousands of dollars a year in the data center.
The suggestion was something like:

=
We store millions of blank punched cards so that they are available when
needed for the data center.

I have designed and written two assembler programs (see listings attached)
that allow us to eliminate this storage requirement.

- The first program allows us to read and store a "master image" of a
single blank punched card, electronically, on spinning magnetic disk.

- The second program can be run, whenever needed, to punch out blank cards
from the image stored on disk.  A parameter card specifies the count of how
many blank cards to punch.

...
=

My father had to gently explain to the corporate guy how he had been
suckered.

Cheers,

Kirk Wolf
Dovetailed Technologies
http://dovetail.com

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Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?]

[Ed Gould]

Paul:

A Bank I used to work for had "tons" of credit card (remember the  
days when they issued a receipt  w/carbon paper and a "card" in the  
back ?
They read them in (scanned?) I never saw that part of the operation  
other than they wheeled carts of cards through the computer room. I  
*vaguely* remember a MES for a card reader to read them. I *think*  
these were scanned though. .


Ed

On Dec 1, 2015, at 3:14 PM, Paul Gilmartin wrote:


On Tue, 1 Dec 2015 14:41:58 -0600, Barry Merrill wrote:


I think a box of 2000 IBM cards is on the order of 6 pounds,
so a TON of JCL cards would be 333 boxes, or about 666,666
card images.

But, the useful weight is zero, since we only use the holes.

But as XKCD once said, "Four boxes of punch cards ought to be  
enough for anyone."


https://what-if.xkcd.com/63/

My memory of carrying around file trays (3, IIRC, when I was  
younger) is "more".


A little Googling says 2.42 g/card.  WAG, I think.

But you could keep it on micro SD cards.

-- gil

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Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?]

[zMan]

But there are "bagels" that have no holes. OTOH, some of us don't really
consider them bagels; one poster on some forum said her husband called them
RBUs -- Round Bread Units.

And if you've ever had real New York or Montreal bagels, you'll know why
folks make that distinction.

OTOH, RBUs make better *sandwiches*, since they're not so tough.

Even some mainframers like them. <== requisite relevance injection

On Tue, Dec 1, 2015 at 6:03 PM, J O Skip Robinson 
wrote:

> (This whole season feels like Friday.) A doughnut, on the other hand,
> requires the hole for its very definition. The hole supplies no mass or
> nutritional value, but without it the thing is not a doughnut. By contrast
> a punch card requires the solid part to give the holes meaning; they would
> otherwise collapse into gibberish.
>
> .
> .
> .
> J.O.Skip Robinson
> Southern California Edison Company
> Electric Dragon Team Paddler
> SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager
> 626-302-7535 Office
> 323-715-0595 Mobile
> jo.skip.robin...@sce.com
>
> -Original Message-
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
> Behalf Of Barry Merrill
> Sent: Tuesday, December 01, 2015 12:42 PM
> To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
> Subject: (External):Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward
> way to determine hardware architecture level?]
>
> I think a box of 2000 IBM cards is on the order of 6 pounds, so a TON of
> JCL cards would be 333 boxes, or about 666,666 card images.
>
> But, the useful weight is zero, since we only use the holes.
>
> Barry
>
>
> Herbert W. "Barry" Merrill, PhD
> President-Programmer
> MXG Software
> Merrill Consultants
> 10717 Cromwell Drive
> Dallas, TX 75229-5112
> ba...@mxg.com
> Fax:  214 350 3694 - Still works, received as email
> Tel:  214 351 1966 - Unreliable, please use email
>
> www.mxg.comHomePage: FAQ answers most questions
> ad...@mxg.com  License Forms, Invoice, Payment, ftp information
> supp...@mxg.comTechnical Issues
> MXG-L FREE ListServer  http://www.mxg.com/mxg-l_listserver/
>
>
>
> -Original Message-
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
> Behalf Of Farley, Peter x23353
> Sent: Tuesday, December 01, 2015 1:59 PM
> To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
> Subject: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine
> hardware architecture level?]
>
> Re: "ton" of JCL, at least one large shop of my prior acquaintance (20 or
> so years ago) had over 250,000 members in the production applications JCL
> libraries.
>
> Not sure how much of that was obsolete at the time, but the batch
> operations control product they used had vast quantities of data as well.
>
> I think that counts as a "ton" or 2 . . . :)
>
> Peter
>
> -Original Message-
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
> Behalf Of Peter Relson
> Sent: Tuesday, December 01, 2015 9:30 AM
> To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
> Subject: Re: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?
>
> 
>
> . . . migrating from Cobol 4 to Cobol 5 without changing a ton of JCL (how
> much JCL is a "ton" anyway?).
>
> --
> For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
> send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
>



-- 
zMan -- "I've got a mainframe and I'm not afraid to use it"

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Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?]

[Mike Schwab]

666K cards at 80 bytes per is 53,333,280.
A IBM 350 for a RAMAC 305 weighs over a ton and hold 5 million 6 bit
characters 3.5MB.
So you would need 15 of those.
Or a PC hard disk drive from 1994 of 60MB.
Or about 30 3.5 floppy disks.
Or a small flash drive of 64M to 2G.
Or a micro SD card of 2G.



On Tue, Dec 1, 2015 at 2:41 PM, Barry Merrill  wrote:
> I think a box of 2000 IBM cards is on the order of 6 pounds,
> so a TON of JCL cards would be 333 boxes, or about 666,666
> card images.
>
> But, the useful weight is zero, since we only use the holes.
>
> Barry
>
>
> Herbert W. "Barry" Merrill, PhD
> President-Programmer
> MXG Software
> Merrill Consultants
> 10717 Cromwell Drive
> Dallas, TX 75229-5112
> ba...@mxg.com
> Fax:  214 350 3694 - Still works, received as email
> Tel:  214 351 1966 - Unreliable, please use email
>
> www.mxg.comHomePage: FAQ answers most questions
> ad...@mxg.com  License Forms, Invoice, Payment, ftp information
> supp...@mxg.comTechnical Issues
> MXG-L FREE ListServer  http://www.mxg.com/mxg-l_listserver/
>
>
>
> -Original Message-
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
> Behalf Of Farley, Peter x23353
> Sent: Tuesday, December 01, 2015 1:59 PM
> To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
> Subject: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine
> hardware architecture level?]
>
> Re: "ton" of JCL, at least one large shop of my prior acquaintance (20 or so
> years ago) had over 250,000 members in the production applications JCL
> libraries.
>
> Not sure how much of that was obsolete at the time, but the batch operations
> control product they used had vast quantities of data as well.
>
> I think that counts as a "ton" or 2 . . . :)
>
> Peter
>
> -Original Message-
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
> Behalf Of Peter Relson
> Sent: Tuesday, December 01, 2015 9:30 AM
> To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
> Subject: Re: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?
>
> 
>
> . . . migrating from Cobol 4 to Cobol 5 without changing a ton of JCL (how
> much JCL is a "ton" anyway?).
>
> --
>
> 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
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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: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?]

[Ed Gould]

On Dec 1, 2015, at 10:54 PM, Mike Schwab wrote:


Correction.  16 IBM 350 disk drives, each weighing a ton.  Is that
what Tennessee Ernie Ford was singing about?


Yea but what about the power requirements and the architectural  
building requirements?


Ed

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Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?]

[Mike Schwab]

Correction.  16 IBM 350 disk drives, each weighing a ton.  Is that
what Tennessee Ernie Ford was singing about?

On Tue, Dec 1, 2015 at 10:51 PM, Mike Schwab  wrote:
> 666K cards at 80 bytes per is 53,333,280.
> A IBM 350 for a RAMAC 305 weighs over a ton and hold 5 million 6 bit
> characters 3.5MB.
> So you would need 15 of those.
> Or a PC hard disk drive from 1994 of 60MB.
> Or about 30 3.5 floppy disks.
> Or a small flash drive of 64M to 2G.
> Or a micro SD card of 2G.
>
>
>
> On Tue, Dec 1, 2015 at 2:41 PM, Barry Merrill  wrote:
>> I think a box of 2000 IBM cards is on the order of 6 pounds,
>> so a TON of JCL cards would be 333 boxes, or about 666,666
>> card images.
>>
>> But, the useful weight is zero, since we only use the holes.
>>
>> Barry
>>
>>
>> Herbert W. "Barry" Merrill, PhD
>> President-Programmer
>> MXG Software
>> Merrill Consultants
>> 10717 Cromwell Drive
>> Dallas, TX 75229-5112
>> ba...@mxg.com
>> Fax:  214 350 3694 - Still works, received as email
>> Tel:  214 351 1966 - Unreliable, please use email
>>
>> www.mxg.comHomePage: FAQ answers most questions
>> ad...@mxg.com  License Forms, Invoice, Payment, ftp information
>> supp...@mxg.comTechnical Issues
>> MXG-L FREE ListServer  http://www.mxg.com/mxg-l_listserver/
>>
>>
>>
>> -Original Message-
>> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
>> Behalf Of Farley, Peter x23353
>> Sent: Tuesday, December 01, 2015 1:59 PM
>> To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
>> Subject: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine
>> hardware architecture level?]
>>
>> Re: "ton" of JCL, at least one large shop of my prior acquaintance (20 or so
>> years ago) had over 250,000 members in the production applications JCL
>> libraries.
>>
>> Not sure how much of that was obsolete at the time, but the batch operations
>> control product they used had vast quantities of data as well.
>>
>> I think that counts as a "ton" or 2 . . . :)
>>
>> Peter
>>
>> -Original Message-
>> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
>> Behalf Of Peter Relson
>> Sent: Tuesday, December 01, 2015 9:30 AM
>> To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
>> Subject: Re: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?
>>
>> 
>>
>> . . . migrating from Cobol 4 to Cobol 5 without changing a ton of JCL (how
>> much JCL is a "ton" anyway?).
>>
>> --
>>
>> 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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>> to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
>>
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>> send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
>
>
>
> --
> Mike A Schwab, Springfield IL USA
> Where do Forest Rangers go to get away from it all?



-- 
Mike A Schwab, Springfield IL USA
Where do Forest Rangers go to get away from it all?

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