Re: MIDRANGE-L Digest V2 #1671

["Mark Walter" <mwalter@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I suggest that Mr. Paris read the OTOH;-) column on the back of this month's
AS/400 Network Expert.
-----Original Message-----
From: Jon.Paris@halinfo.it <Jon.Paris@halinfo.it>
To: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com <MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com>
Date: Friday, November 19, 1999 12:28 PM
Subject: Re: MIDRANGE-L Digest V2 #1671


>
>
> >> Along these lines, is it Urban Legend that early on all of IBM's
programmers
>wrote  the mid-range system programming in RPG and that is the reason it
became
>so tight and well behaved?
>
>If IBM developers (other than the MAPICS folks among others) ever wrote in
RPG
>at all it is news to me.
>
>The midrange heritage, and RPG along with it, is one of Tabs and Calcs
>(Tabulators an Calculators as they were known where I worked). The RPG
cycle has
>a direct one-to-one relationship with the card cycle used by such
equipment.
>Hell even the level breaks are an exact match!
>
>COBOL was used for commercial programming in big shops, smaller shops (if
they
>used anything) used Tabs. As computers came down in price, languages like
RPG
>came in to allow direct translation of the Tab plug boards to the new
computers.
>The language took hold in that segment of the market and most midrange
platforms
>(Wang, ICL, Data General, DEC, HP) implemented some flavor of the language
at
>one time or another. Before the PC revolution, the mini computers arrived.
Some,
>from IBM and others, supported RPG. Many more (Centurion, MAI-Basic4 and
others)
>tended to be based on assorted flavors of Basic. Of all of these systems,
the
>only real survivor is the AS/400.
>
>I'd better stop now, I'm getting all misty-eyed. Oh for the days when you
knew
>your invoicing program had gone wrong because the printer and card-reader
rhythm
>changed from "chunck, chunck, wing, bang, clank" to "chuck, bang, chunck,
click,
>clunk, wallop".
>
>
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