IEHIEB... names 2410

"Independent" meaning stand-alone (not executed under the OS). One highly irritating characteristic was that they typed out the *entire* contents of every control card -- including all trailing spaces. With a console speed of 14.6 cps the wasted time could be excruciatingly painful. (My first mod to OS-360 was to prune the trailing spaces from the console output of IBCDMPRS.)

Beginning with SVS, this utility was able to run without requiring that a DD card be provided for each data set involved. As best I can recall this was the only IEB* utility with this ability.

As distributed it wouldn't work under OS-360. I made a small tweak to it (details of which I don't recall but IIRC it involved an appendage) and it ran quite happily for several years on OS-360.

"DG" := "Data Generator". Rather convoluted control cards; I don't recall hearing of common use of any but the most basic functions.

These two served much the same purpose. UPDAT was more primative, but seemed to be more popular.

Worse than that: you had to remember to rerun it whenever you replaced *any* SVC load.

This was a performance tool: to save time SVC loads had a table at the end of the 1024-byte modules that listed successor modules; IEHIOSUP resolved these to TTR (relative disk address) values so when the SVC load wanted to pbutt control to a successor there was no need to spend the time searching the PDS directory. Make a change (or compress SVCLIB) and forget to run IEHIOSUP was guaranteed to eventually result in a system crash.

The IEHLIST output for a VTOC could be a raw hex dump of the entries. One of the CEs reportedly was given a very large award for designing an acetate overlay that made it easy to find each of the fields in the dump of each of the DSCB record types.

And a magnet for bugs. I never figured out a reason for it, but IEHMOVE always had more than its fair share of APARs.

A question I've wondered about: was there ever a program "ZAP" which later was modified to become "SUPERZAP"? The SUPERZAP program itself was for years distributed as a low-numbered PTF before becoming an official part of the OS along with a few other FE goodies (recall the run of running IMDSADMP?), but I don't recall ever hearing its history.

Joe Morris