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




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