I appreciate your comments and maybe I am all wrong - not sure.
However, it has nothing to do with "conspiracy theory". Its just good marketing strategy.
IMO, the proof is in the pudding - it worked!
RPG and COBOL should never have lasted 50+ years until 2013 - that in itself is remarkable and a testament to the value of locking clients into a specific hardware brand & OS.
I sense a bit of hostility in your tone towards IBM's relationship with Rochester :).
But from an outsider's perspective, it is mind-boggling why IBM didn't shut down proprietary OS's ages ago. So one could argue that IBM has stuck with Rochester thru thick and thin when all other H/W and S/W companies had abandoned the proprietary approach decades ago.
Even though you disagree with my argument, surely you must agree that if Iseries only ran popular languages such as C and Java, it would be long gone???
-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Jon Paris
Sent: Thursday, April 18, 2013 11:10 AM
To: rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: 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
midrange.com
