Re:IBM will offer free COBOL training
by RickJWagner on Saturday April 11, 2020 @01:35PM
(#22842883)
Yes, indeed. I started as a bank programmer, working on an IBM mainframe.
At night, nearly the whole machine was consumed by batch processing. If there was some problem that required a late-night fix, it was worked out first on green-bar print of the program, using hex to determine what was in the registers. Then the code could be submitted via ICCF, but the wait for a compile could take literally hours.
If you mis-typed something (say a forgotten period), the compile would fail and you would have to resubmit the job. Waiting hours again!
At night, nearly the whole machine was consumed by batch processing. If there was some problem that required a late-night fix, it was worked out first on green-bar print of the program, using hex to determine what was in the registers. Then the code could be submitted via ICCF, but the wait for a compile could take literally hours. If you mis-typed something (say a forgotten period), the compile would fail and you would have to resubmit the job. Waiting hours again!