Not Your Dad's Mainframe: Little Iron 3998

huge amount of OS-360 TESTRAN was outputing all the (12-2-9) "SYM" cards as part of buttemble-compile ... so that you effectively could support symbolic debugging. I don't know anybody that actually used it ... I remember having a TESTRAN manual at one point and running with option to generate SYM cards (just to see what they looked like) ... but never actually using it.

old post that has mention of "SYM" cards (as well as formats of most of the other 12-2-9 cards):

PER and TRACE command were initially "machine" level stuff ... hex addresses, hex locations ... etc .. not real symbolic stuff.

I wrote a debug tool in REX(X) called DUMPRX that eventually was used extensively internally and at one point by nearly all the (vm-cms) field support people

that had some amount of symbolic capability

this has comment about locate command and symbolics (and testran) ... from 2001:

I had originally done "pageable" CP kernel function for cp67 3.1 the summer I did a stint with BCS in Seattle (i was still undergraduate) ... which didn't get released in product until vm370. Part of the thing that I did as part of the pageable CP kernel function was to capture the loader table symbolics (all the external entries) and write it out as part of the kernel image. this feature including the complete loader table symbolics as part of the (pageable) kernel image wasn't included in the pageable kernel that went out in vm370 release 1. As a result, there were periodic games played with a compiled module frequently called DMKSYM ... that had symbolics for some amount of kernel external entries.

however, when i got around to doing dumprx, i recreated the capture of the complete loader table symbolics as part of saving the kernel image. Then the "locate" command was changed to use all the complete loader table entries saved out in the pageable kernel (instead of DMKSYM) ... and other things were enhanced to utilize the actual loader table entries.

vm-cms postmortem kernel dump processing had facility of importing an image of the loader printed output. I modified the kernel dump process to initialize the dump image with a copy of the complete loader table image (from saving the original kernel image) as part of system startup.

....

this has breastle of "A Survey of current debugging concepts"

it looks somewhat like a cms-script document printed on 1403 with TN train (some of the rendering looks wavy ... which might be scanning the original, it not, then it isn't likely to have been 1403 output). It is dated August, 1968 plus 1 ... and it has section 3-34 "TESTRAN, for IBM System-360"

I now some number of gov. installations had cp67 (and cms, and script, etc) in 68 plus 1 ... but I don't know if Goddard had one(?).

The above does list TESTRAN reference as:

IBM Corporation. IBM System-360 Operating System TESTRAN. Systems Reference Library. Form C28-6648-0 File Number S360-37. February 1967