HECnet October 2013

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37 participants
836 discussions

FMS, SMG$, Windowing/Forms on a Text Terminal

by jg＠jordi.guillaumes.name

El 01/10/2013, a les 11:10, Mark Wickens <mark at wickensonline.co.uk> va escriure: I understand where you're coming from Sampsa with regards to forms on text terminals. I've always found applications that do this strangely fascinating for no particular reason. I remember back around 1992 when I was working for Cyberscience one of the lead developers wrote a terminal based application to create database queries visually and I thought it was just so cool! DEC had several products which did forms. FMS was the oldest and IIRC the most extended. Then there was also TDMS and DecForms, which was very, very powerful but vastly complicated. I used it, and have to confess I liked it. A lot. Then there was a product called RALLY, which was a 4G system to do database applications. It generated automatically database maintenance forms, including hyerarchical formats. It had a pascal-ish programming languange to do scripting and non-forms logic. I liked that one too (albeit it was slow as hell). I also worked at the PPA in Newcastle around the 2000s which was an IBM mainframe shop. The JCL boys were a law unto themselves and it was clear they would have a job for life all the time no one switched off the big iron. I'm drawn to the esoteric so found that environment equally interesting, although I would be totally clueless to how it is driven. That is job security thru obscurity. Believe me, JCL is _NOT_ that hard. It has basically four instructions (JOB, EXEC, PROC and DD) and their corresponding parameters, which if you read the docs can seem like a lot... until you realize you will be using just a small subset in real life. Jordi Guillaumes i Pons jg at jordi.guillaumes.name HECnet: BITXOV::JGUILLAUMES

10 years, 7 months

FMS, SMG$, Windowing/Forms on a Text Terminal

by mark＠wickensonline.co.uk

I understand where you're coming from Sampsa with regards to forms on text terminals. I've always found applications that do this strangely fascinating for no particular reason. I remember back around 1992 when I was working for Cyberscience one of the lead developers wrote a terminal based application to create database queries visually and I thought it was just so cool! I also worked at the PPA in Newcastle around the 2000s which was an IBM mainframe shop. The JCL boys were a law unto themselves and it was clear they would have a job for life all the time no one switched off the big iron. I'm drawn to the esoteric so found that environment equally interesting, although I would be totally clueless to how it is driven. Mark. -- http://www.wickensonline.co.uk http://hecnet.eu http://declegacy.org.uk http://retrochallenge.net https://twitter.com/#!/%40urbancamo

10 years, 7 months

Humour value alternative to DCL - a port OS/390 ISPF to VMS :)

by hvlems＠zonnet.nl

At Fujitsu we did have an IBM mainframe (dos/vse and VM). It had no network interface by itself. Eventually it was connected to the LAN via a channel attached DECnet gateway. In order to test connectivity we had to submit jcl decks. I agree fully with you how that language (?) was designed: a mess. On Burroughs one has WFL and that looks like A lol. Jcl looks like assembler without a proper design... Van: Sampsa Laine Verzonden: maandag 30 september 2013 21:38 Aan: hecnet at Update.UU.SE Beantwoorden: hecnet at Update.UU.SE Onderwerp: Re: [HECnet] Humour value alternative to DCL - a port OS/390 ISPF to VMS :) >> name but it was a blessing because the shell commands were beyond human Ever try to write anything in JCL? :) That language is messed up, I have about 3 books on it and still can't really figure out how it works except by direct copying scripts from the book to a live system. Sometimes I even manage to compile COBOL programs, but I haven't figured out the LINK EDITOR which one needs to turn the output into an executable. Interesting experience though, might come in handy when I come across clients with big System z or S/390 setups..

10 years, 7 months

VT-62?

by wilson＠dbit.com

From: "Jerome H. Fine" <jhfinedp3k at compsys.to> In another 30 years, it is almost certain that no one will even know what these terminals are, let alone that any will actually work or that there will be systems to use them with. Even after the first 30 years, here's a dumb question: what color is a VT52? Mine (which does work) is a nice cirty yellow, like coffee-stained linoleum, even after a good scrub. But when I was working on an icon for emulated VT52 sessions, it occurred to me that making it look like *my* VT52 might be dumb. Were VT52s always yellowish, or did they begin life as sparkly white as the bottom of a VT100 keyboard, and it takes 30 years of sunburn to get them where they are now? I bought the stuff to make some Retro-Brite ages ago but still haven't gotten around to mixing it up. John Wilson D Bit

10 years, 7 months

VT-62?

by jhfinedp3k＠compsys.to

>Bob Armstrong wrote: What can be done (non-destructive suggestions only, please) with a VT-62? This is NOT a VT52 (although it looks like one). The VT62 is a block mode terminal that, I think, actually speaks DDCMP. AFAIK it's incapable of being a plain ASCII terminal unless there's some hack I'm unaware of. If you are able to use the VT62 terminal under RT-11, DEC supported a special variant of KED specifically for the VT62, namely K62.SAV, as opposed to the variant, Ked.SAV, for the VT100. There is also a variant of KED specifically for the VT52, namely K52.SAV, in addition to a separate variant for the VT100, Ker.SAV, which is used when RSTS/E is the PDP-11 operating system. While these two special variants of Ked.SAV, namely K52.SAV and K62.SAV, are not generally available, at least K52.SAV can be downloaded as part of the binary RT-11 distribution from some of those distributions starting with V04.00 of RT-11. After DEC stopped supporting the VT52 and VT62 terminals (around 1989), the KED variants for these two terminals were still maintained, but not longer included in the standard RT-11 binary distributions. All of the KED variants, including K62.SAV, can still be produced for V05.06 of RT-11. Although it is not possible to determine if K62.SAV is correct, the two variants of KED which are included in the distribution for V05.06 of RT-11, Ked.SAV and Kex.SAV, are identical to the copies produced from the source code when all nine of the DEC supported variants of KED are assembled and linked. So it seems very probable that the K52.SAV and K62.SAV variants are correct as well. I am not familiar with exactly what special features K62.SAV uses in the VT62 terminal, so it is not possible for me to advise you in that regard. Aside from RT-11, I am not aware of any other application program which knows anything at all about the VT62 terminal, let alone the differences between the VT52 and the VT62. Right now the only thing I can think of is to part it out as spares for my VT52. I have two of the latter and it looks like at least some of the major assemblies - CRT, keyboard, power supply - are identical. I hate to do that, though, if there's a better use for it. If you really do have a working VT62 (or one that can be repaired), that would be sad situation if you were to use the VT62 are spares for the VT52. There are probably very few working VT52 terminals around these days although I may still have one (it has not been turned on for at least a few years). I doubt that there are even a fraction of that number of VT62 terminals left anywhere. On the other hand, all the VT52 and VT62 terminals are over 30 years old. In another 30 years, it is almost certain that no one will even know what these terminals are, let alone that any will actually work or that there will be systems to use them with. So if you can use the VT62 parts to keep a VT52 in working order, it is your terminal to do as you wish. For example, there has been no one interested in a new variant of KED which supports the VT420 with more than 24 lines, named (appropriately I think) the K42.SAV, which I use under Ersatz-11. Since there is support, under the VT100 emulation included with Ersatz-11, for up to 255 columns by 255 lines (in particular for the Win32 variant), K42.SAV has been enhanced to support both of those screen sizes, although NOT at the same time. In practical terms, the best my monitor can support under the DOS variant of Ersatz-11 is either 80 columns by 50 lines OR 132 columns by 44 lines. For the Win32 variant of Ersatz-11, there is support for a screen size on the monitor of up to approximately 200 columns by 70 lines. Along with a much larger cut / paste buffer and some very nice extra features for the HELP screens, I find that K42.SAV is much improved over DEC variant, Ked.SAV, which is limited to 24 lines. Jerome Fine

10 years, 7 months

Humour value alternative to DCL - a port OS/390 ISPF to VMS :)

by jg＠jordi.guillaumes.name

El 01/10/2013, a les 0:40, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> va escriure: As (primarily) UNIX people, we are trained to think in terms of abstraction layers and common interfaces. The IBM mainframe world in general, and JCL in particular, find no value at all in that. Production shops today, on modern hardware, still sometimes think in terms of allocating cylinders on disk drives for job output. Not 'sometimes'. Most of times. A IBM educated programmer misses the possibility of limiting the output storage used by a program. The idea of a runaway program eating a whole filesystem is... weird. On the other hand, the 'file' concept is abstract in MVS. The programmer uses 'files' which are bound to real physical datasets via JCL, so there is some level of abstraction at the I/O level. VMS and RSX 11M+ have the logical name stuff, which can be seen as similar to the DD cards in a job. Unfortunately UNIX dies not have anything similar (symlinks being the closest ). JCL is fast to parse, efficient to execute, and hard to read and write. Most of the JCL is generated automatically from skeletons or put together by a program. It is a little bit hard to code JCL by hand, but it is really easy to write a JCL generator. The IBM mainframe world never bought into that bullshit idea of "programmer time is more important than processor time", because, well, it isn't. The programmer does whatever is fastest for the computer to execute. Well, the damn subcapping thing makes an installation to be very aware about CPU usage. And, one way or another, IBM always wins this war... -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

10 years, 7 months

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HECnet October 2013