Software for IBM 36030 was DOS360: Forty years 518

Joe Morris

I don't remember the number.

FWIW, is there a breakdown to the following? PP 5688-197 IBM COBOL for MVS and VM 1.2.0 9603 (This is what we're using as we speak.)

period the

I'm pretty sure they were purple.

Thanks for the explanation. That makes more sense.

Speaking of copyrights, do copyrights of old stuff automatically renew forever (in 'perpetuity'?) I have an IBM book "Men Minutes Money" by TJ Watson copyright 1934. In the past copyrights would eventually expire (only allowed a finite time even with renewals); but IIRC the copyright law was changed. I'm just curious if this book is still under copyright protection.

They told me the system (IIRC it was "PAL" for patient billing) used homerolled on-disk subroutines as well as a homerolled database on disk. I guess by today's standards it wasn't that complex, but for 16k and running a whole enterprise it seemed powerful. It did handle a high volume of transactions against a large table of billable items.

I think you're right 281-282. I think the disk was 13n. I think the IPL setting was 131, but we rarely changed that. Once the C-Es IPL'd from the card reader for special diagnostics.

(As an aside, why does IBM call it "IPL" when everyone says "boot up"?)

When I changed jobs it blew my mind the incredibly fast time of newer tape jobs, esp ones that handled 6250.

I liked when cartridges came out because they were stored in the computer room and we no longer had to send in a tape pull slip to the tape librarian. Even better was the "silo" since mounts were automated. Still better was tons and tons of disk space eliminating the need for cart altogether. However, sometimes our jobs crash for inadequate free disk space when too many things are running at once and SMS can't handle it.

It's funny--our peak machine time used to be 9-5 due to on-line needs, but now we peak overnight with lots of heavy duty batch jobs. Our old IMS database is split into ten separate databases for handling efficiency and simultaneous use. I don't know if that would be done today. Is IMS even used for new work or is it all DB2?