Re: New to RPG

My first experience as an instructor was teaching ICL's version of RPG (known as NICOL) to tabulator operators, accountants, bookkeepers, etc. In those days we did many tabulator conversions as well as introduce computers to companies that had not introduced any form of bookkeeping automation.

Prior to that I did actually program tabs and calcs and did a lot of work in that area when the UK went to decimal currency before moving on to the early midrange computers offered by ICL (who in those days were bigger than IBM in Europe).


Jon Paris

www.partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com

On Apr 27, 2017, at 6:35 PM, James H. H. Lampert <jamesl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 4/27/17, 3:16 PM, Jon Paris wrote:

Many many moons ago when IT was in its infancy there was a category
of early "computing" devices known as tabulators.

. . .

Tabulators processed punch cards

. . .

But if totals etc. needed to be produced, then you needed to know
when the following card had different values

. . .

Welcome to the RPG cycle and level breaks! They were designed to
provide a simulation of the original punch card equipment.

P.S. Indicators (*IN03 etc.) are from the same heritage. By
connecting a wire from a specific column to an output that always
provided a current at a specific timing point you could "turn on" an
indicator when (say) column 1 contained a "5" or a different
indicator if it contained a "6".

Quite true. Tabulators were examples of what are more generally (and formally) called "plugboard-programmable unit record machines."

IBM Rochester was a plugboard-programmable unit record machine factory.

The S/3 (the original ancestor of the IBM Midrange line) was created because IBM wanted to build a better unit record machine. They very specifically did NOT want a "minicomputer," because they didn't want anything to compete with their full-sized mainframes. They were already getting entirely too much competition from a little upstart called DEC, that had introduced something called the PDP-1 a decade earlier.

RPG's traditional syntax, I'm told, is based on plugboards for unit record machines. Which makes a great deal of sense, given what Jon just said. The idea was, if you could wire a plugboard, you could code in RPG. And so RPG became the predominant language for this new "better unit record machine" because you didn't need to hire a "programmer"; you could just put it in the hands of the kid in the mailroom who'd taught himself (or herself) how to wire plugboards in his (or her) spare time. (I find myself thinking of that scene in Hidden Figures, when Dorothy looked at a maze of wiring that had the engineers stumped, instinctively found and corrected the problem, and got the new mainframe going.)

--
JHHL

(FWIW, the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, CA, has a restored IBM 1401 and a restored DEC PDP-1, both of which are demonstrated on a regular schedule. They also have a restored IBM RAMAC hard drive, that they've managed to interface with a notebook computer for demonstrations.)
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