[Info-vax] Current VMS engineering quality, was: Re: What's VMS up to these

[Richard B. Gilbert]

On 3/19/2012 8:24 AM, Michael Kraemer wrote:
> In article<2Madne-FtOAHtPjSnZ2dnUVZ_qydnZ2d at giganews.com>, "Richard B. Gilbert"
> <rgilbert88 at comcast.net>  writes:
>
>> Well, lets say that UNIX as we now know it was due in large part, to the
>> Comp Sci, students at Berkely.  It's thanks to them we are not writing
>> IBM JCL!
>
> You don't "write" JCL,

I don't write JCL any longer!  In 1970 I was employed as a Fortran 
programmer and and "computer expert".  The IBM PC was not yet available.

I wrote JCL procedures and ran them on Princeton University's IBM 360 
Model 91.  This was what passed for a "super computer" in the bad old 
days.  I have more computing power and disk storage underneath my desk 
now than they ever dreamed of in 1970.  There were a lot of pre-written
JCL procedures such that you could invoke "FORTGCLG" which in turn ran 
the Fortran G compiler, followed by the Linker, and if nothing bombed, 
your program ran and you got results back.  If the "canned" JCL didn't 
do exactly what you needed, you could "roll your own".


> you just copy a CNTL dataset (or member) which has worked before.
> Today it's "cut and paste", back then it was "copy and modify".

Now, yes!  Then, you COULD store your JCL on disk and pay, dearly, for 
the space on a "resident" disk.  If you didn't use a resident disk, you
could pay and wat to have a disk mounted.  Mostly we used punched cards.

There was a timesharing system.  You could die of old age waiting to get 
your prompt back.  Most of us preferred the batch system!