Re: why rpg and not cobol

On Thu, 18 Apr 2013, at 14:58:55, "Stone, Joel" <Joel.Stone@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

OK so there were dozens of responses but no right answers :)

The reason why RPG is the preferred language on iseries (and not COBOL): follow the money!

IBM was bringing thousands of organizations into the IBM 360 computer age back in the 1960s & 1970s, only to see them move to the "B.U.N.C.H." three years later - where they could run COBOL for less $.

(Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, or Honeywell)

IBM had a choice way back when.

Guide clients to purchase IBM hardware and develop in COBOL ... and then the clients would be running a "commodity" platform where they could more easily jump ship in a few years;

OR

Guide clients to RPG - where the client was then CAPTIVE since no other machine had a serious RPG compiler.

I'm not saying that nobody in IBM ever thought this way Joel - but I think you are wrong for many reasons nut mostly ...

In those days I worked for a UK manufacturer who was bigger than IBM in Europe at the time. We also invented an "RPG" - it was called NICOL but fundamentally the same language. It was not done to defend against loss of COBOL clients - in fact at the time DG/Wang/DEC/etc. were still mostly gleams in their father's eyes. We did it because we had large numbers of clients using unit record equipment (Tabs, Calcs, Sorters, etc.) who had no easy way forward. But developing an "RPG" language that mirrored the Tabs capabilities exactly but with a written program not a plug board we were able to convert them to the new lower-cost computers that had been developed because our mainframe line was too expensive and bigger than they needed. IBM I suspect was in exactly_ the same position.

Perhaps you are too young to recall tabs - or just like conspiracy theory - but if you were right don't you think the rest of IBM would have supported Rochester instead of spending decades trying to destroy them?

P.S. Most if not all of the "bunch" had pretty good RPG compilers. The ones on Wang and HP were particularly good.


Jon Paris

www.partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com