Software for IBM 36030 was DOS360: Forty years 514

Joe Morris RPQ?

No. This happened in 1977 and our machine was a 3rd-party owned lease, though we did contract to IBM for maintenance.

They (I think the leasing company) put on a big box (supposedly built for a model 50) on the edge of the machine. We needed another 64k (to go from 128 to 192) and that's what we got. Initiallyt they wired it in wrong and the CPU 'thought' we had 256k and certain programs (like SORT which used all the core available to it) fouled (they ran fine but the output was garbage). I noticed the 256k reference in the COBOL compile and a screwed up xref listing.

IBM was reportedly very upset with my employer when they ceased renting directly from IBM and went to a 3rd party lease, but apparently the cost savings were significant. Some of our software was rented from IBM (such as the better COBOL F? compiler instead of the 'default' one D?.) But AFAIK most of the systems and application software remained free (DOS-Rel 26) and "SHAS", a hospital accounting system. I never understood why IBM didn't charge us for all of the IBM software we were using since we didn't rent the machine from them. Apparently IBM let a lot of stuff become free.

We also had a card sorter. I never understood why they kept that and pre-sorted certain input decks (for 1401 applications) rather than sorting them within the computer. Maybe for 1401 stuff it was too cumbersome. I know emulated 1311 disks wasted a heck of a lot of space on our 2314s.

We ran a batch background, "POWER" a spooler in one foreground, and a cheapo imitation CICS (from IBM) in the other foreground. I forgot the product name, but I remember the manual was written in a very informal style which was strange for an IBM publication.

The throughput improvement from the spooler was tremendous. Almost all of our work didn't use many CPU cycles and was limited by card reader and printer speed.

I made the mistake of developing a system using our two tapes. Our 2415 was horribly slow. It annoyed me that only one tape of the pair would run at a time, I couldn't understand why there wasn't overlap and more buffering. In other words, while it was writing a new record, why couldn't it be simultaneously reading the next record.

(I understand today everything is a la carte and rather expensive. My present employer would love to reduce the many CA- products we rent but most are too deeply embedded and conversion would be terribly costly. It was rough just getting rid of old DYL260 and use only DYL280. We also use Easytrieve and SAS. But we are a consolidation of four once-independent data centers and each data center had their own preferences for support software products. Two were ROSCOE, one was VM-CP, one TSO, for example. They wanted to dump VM, but again it was too embedded.)