GnuCOBOL 3.1.1 - Hackdot

Re:GnuCOBOL 3.1.1 by enthd on Friday December 11, 2020 @09:40AM (#25386289)

Ah COBOL, oddly enough I started my first dev job in COBOL in the banking industry(I'm in my 30s and started my professional coding career in my 20s), I have mixed feelings about it...it's a weird language but it has it's place, I wouldn't advise anyone to jump into a COBOL career path unless you are doing it for a job and a job alone.

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Re:GnuCOBOL 3.1.1 by the_only_law on Friday December 11, 2020 @09:53AM (#25386430)

I would kill to get a personal mainframe though. Read a story some time ago about some guy who snagged one from a government auction. Sadly they never have anything cool when I look.

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Re:GnuCOBOL 3.1.1 by kjs3 on Friday December 11, 2020 @01:30PM (#25388944)

I remember that story. I don't think he ever got it working. There's a lot to getting a real mainframe running, starting with some onerous licensing terms for the software. And the cost to power one would be ugly.

There were some actual 'personal mainframes' made by IBM. The PC/370 was a PC or PC/AT with a set of ISA bus mainframe processor addin cards. The PC became the I/O processor. The PC/390 was a later version based on a PS/2 running OS/2. All long obsolete now.

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Re:GnuCOBOL 3.1.1 by galoisgirl on Saturday December 12, 2020 @05:02AM (#25397172)

He did, his talk about it is really interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45X4VP8CGtk

> He and his old computer friends played around with some applications that were on the platform, and even made an FTP server that put some data on the internet.

Per https://www.fastcompany.com/3063265/this-teenage-ibm-employe...

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Re:GnuCOBOL 3.1.1 by kjs3 on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @02:37PM (#25434083)

Fun, thanks for that. I clearly stopped paying attention too early. Awesome they stuck to it.

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Re:GnuCOBOL 3.1.1 by galoisgirl on Friday December 11, 2020 @11:39AM (#25387642)

You can get a free account on one, for example in Master the Mainframe.

Sure, it's not half as cool as having the machine like that guy, but you don't need to reinforce the floor in your house, so there's that.

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Re:GnuCOBOL 3.1.1 by paulie_a on Friday December 11, 2020 @10:49AM (#25387029)

Ebay sometimes has them

Otherwise if you live in the Midwest...uw oshkosh use to have one for free. The stipulation was that you had to remove it from the campus. And it weighed 3 tons

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Re:GnuCOBOL 3.1.1 by shrubble on Friday December 11, 2020 @10:43AM (#25386953)

The Hercules emulator plus the MVS 3.8j version of the IBM mainframe operating system are both freely available.

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Re:GnuCOBOL 3.1.1 by rhabarba on Friday December 11, 2020 @09:55AM (#25386448)

Buy one. IBM still produces them.

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