RPG on the mainframewhy never popular 813
at one point in the early 80s ... there were periodic claims that for some months, i was in some way responsible for 20 to 30 percent of all bits flowing across...
The DOS and OS-360 (I think you meant that and not "OS370") implementations of RPG -- and the other languages -- were provided without charge. For that matter, IBM didn't even bother to copyright the code.
Now...if you're thinking about the post-New World program products, *everything* was expensive. Some old stuff that for some reason is still in my bookshelves (hint: there's a chicken on the back cover, carrying a sign reading "I'm Back!") has the 1991 prices for RPG-370 V1 (5688-127): a basic license for a group 40 installation (4381-clbutt) was $81,840 for a one-time payment, or $1,705 per month.
By comparison, Fortran VS Compiler and Library (5668-087) for a group 40 machine was $33,020 (one-time) or $772-mo.
No, that doesn't look right, but (buttuming that I'm not misreading something) my guess would be that the bean counters skewed the pricing to reflect the expected number of customers for RPG vs. FORTRAN.
learning Well, that depends on the type of work to be done. My background was in a...
Difference of capacity, not function. The 026-029 keypunches supported two layouts on the program card: one used rows 12-3 and the other used rows 4-9. IIRC the 129 supported ten programs.
Joe Morris
RPG on the mainframewhy never popular 814
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