Re: Wusu?

>  From:    mboceanside@worldnet.att.net (Pat Barber)
  
>  I think by now you know what WSU stands for, but here is a little more
>  background.
>  
>  WSU was introduced on the S/34 to quickly create data entry programs
>  that would replace key punch machines. 

Thankyou for that history ... I learned some that I had managed to miss, but 
I disagree with one statement.

>  The S/34 had NO support for cards as the S/3 did, so in order for people
>  to very quickly start using a terminal based systems, WSU came about as
>  a "quick & dirty" way to write terminal based programs. RPG progressed
>  pretty quickly after that, so RPG was the logical thing to transition to
>  after folks learned how to deal with online apps. 

Several employers ago I was at a place with S/34 and support for punched 
cards, from IBM no less, but also from a bunch of other vendors.  It is quite 
possible that IBM marketed a non-standard offering for us to try to wean us 
off punched cards, since we were calling IBM service constantly on key punch 
machines that IBM had stopped marketing in the dark ages of tabulating 
equipment ... we had hundreds of millions of punched cards in constant use at 
the time we migrated to S/3x & the business was still utterly dependent on 
them when we moved to S/34, although in less volume.

As I recall, there were a few alternative ways to get punched cards into the 
S/34 & not quite as many ways to get S/34 data back into punched cards.  We 
ended up with a multi-vendor approach ... Decision Data for input from 
punched cards, and NCR for output to punched cards.  Had we gone the 100% IBM 
route there was inexpensive hardware to convert punched card data between 
what passed for diskettes in those days & vica versa, but we preferred 
punched cards directly input to S/34 & S/34 data directly to punched cards 
with no middle men media handling, and as weird as it might seem today, the 
end users were comfortable with punched cards & did not want to have to learn 
handling those strange diskette things also.

Al Macintyre  ©¿©
http://www.cen-elec.com MIS Manager Programmer & Computer Janitor
When in doubt, read the manual, assuming you can find the right one.
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