Indigo Domotics

DaveL17 wrote:

I distinctly remember Matt and Jay saying that the future path was Cobol 60 because, and I quote, "FLOW-MATIC is too pedantic."

First job right out of college was to read/make sense of this HUGE COBOL system the Air Force Reserve was using for logistics support on a Wang VS. The source was about 4 inches thick when printed on an old line printer. Maintenance had become a nightmare so they contracted with us to "fix" it. We wanted to rewrite it in Ada (um, yeah, this was 1988 and Ada was all the rage in the government) but they chose to port it to a "new" AT&T 3B2/600 unix box and use a "porting" library to handle the Wang specific interface code (character-based of course). That in itself was a nightmare, but fortunately I bailed to a different job before I had to do any work on the port.

Ah, the memories...

Ack. AT&T 3B computers. That was my first serious introduction to UNIX. Moved from CA to MD to work on a big UNIX project for No Such Agency. Left within a year.

Though I have to say the 3B20 units had serious internal battery backups. You could unplug them, wheel them into a truck, move them to a different building, plug them in, all without shutting them down. Leave it to AT&T to repurpose a phone switching system to a general purpose computer.

FlyingDiver wrote:

Though I have to say the 3B20 units had serious internal battery backups. You could unplug them, wheel them into a truck, move them to a different building, plug them in, all without shutting them down. Leave it to AT&T to repurpose a phone switching system to a general purpose computer.

No need to say "different building". I think what you meant to say was unplug them, put them on a truck, and move them to Terry's garage.

First job right out of college was to read/make sense of this HUGE COBOL system the Air Force Reserve was using for logistics support

During college I coop-ed with a DoD contractor... Laughed when I could have chosen to work on a COBOL system and instead chose to work on a C based program that an engineer had written to read aircraft stress data. Little did I know the quality of code that mechanical and electrical engineers write... we all have our stories, but I about went back and asked for COBOL when I ran into defines all over the place such as SIX = 6. Because, yeah, that helped. But then I remembered that the alternative was actually COBOL and came to my senses.

No comment.

If you were Apple this would have generated approximately 17,456 blog posts, two analyst papers, quotes from "supply chain sources", rendered mock-ups, and a few nerdgasms.

DaveL17 wrote:

FlyingDiver wrote:

Though I have to say the 3B20 units had serious internal battery backups. You could unplug them, wheel them into a truck, move them to a different building, plug them in, all without shutting them down. Leave it to AT&T to repurpose a phone switching system to a general purpose computer.

No need to say "different building". I think what you meant to say was unplug them, put them on a truck, and move them to Terry's garage.

Funny you mention that, I've been UPS/alternative power shopping lately. I only have the DL 580, 2 fibre channel arrays and one of the DL 980s powered up (and it's in low-power mode), I don't have enough backup capacity to run everything and my breaker panel is (over) full...

We're really wanting to move this year so I've been cleaning out the basement (literally, not a metaphor) and have to admit I'm a serious technology hoarder. I can't tell you how many 9.6, 28.8, and 56k modems I've thrown away this weekend. I have large tubs filled with every kind of cable possible, everything form CAT7 and ultimate fibre to twinax and giant v35 extensions. Anyone need a vampire tap for thicknet coax, or 7 Pentium 4 SFF desktops? I also have every cell phone I've owned for the last 20 years, everything from a candy bar phone, to a flip, to the first Windows mobile phones, to almost every version of the iPhone. WHY??? I've made a HUGE donation pile, I'll let the Salvation Army figure out if any of this junk is worth more than just memories.

I got to use/admin with the 3B20s a while back during a stint with AT&T and a local bell. Fantastic 32-bit beasts they were.

Terry

RogueProeliator wrote:

First job right out of college was to read/make sense of this HUGE COBOL system the Air Force Reserve was using for logistics support

During college I coop-ed with a DoD contractor... Laughed when I could have chosen to work on a COBOL system and instead chose to work on a C based program that an engineer had written to read aircraft stress data. Little did I know the quality of code that mechanical and electrical engineers write... we all have our stories, but I about went back and asked for COBOL when I ran into defines all over the place such as SIX = 6. Because, yeah, that helped. But then I remembered that the alternative was actually COBOL and came to my senses.

There's a big push for COBOL devs. happening, at least in Central/Northern Alabama. All the banks, financial institutions and military operations/contractors are experiencing a serious recruitment challenge because NOBODY is teaching/learning COBOL now, but these companies still have billions (collectively) invested and can't just walk away. I have several friends who work as tech recruiters and they're saying that a lot of colleges and tech schools are starting to resurrect their old COBOL programs just to try to fill the gap that's being created. I know that here where I work, once we finally shut down our mainframe in 2014, our COBOL devs we're sucked up before they got out the door. Not too bad of a deal, a VERY nice severance from here, plus a position making more money at their new place of work.

Terry

roussell wrote:

There's a big push for COBOL devs. happening, at least in Central/Northern Alabama.

The experience I mentioned earlier was at Maxwell AFB in Montgomery. Guess we could call Alabama the COBOL system maintenance capital of the country...

Sounds like I might have the opportunity to get out some of my old COBOL coding pads and punched cards that I used to use on an IBM 360

jay (support) wrote:

roussell wrote:

There's a big push for COBOL devs. happening, at least in Central/Northern Alabama.

The experience I mentioned earlier was at Maxwell AFB in Montgomery. Guess we could call Alabama the COBOL system maintenance capital of the country...

HA!! Highly possible! I passed over a PM job down in Montgomery (which is about 2 hours South of my home) 4-5 years ago for a Mainframe --> java transition for a large company. Several years later I hear though the grapevine that they've spent millions on the transition, and are nowhere close to being finished. The business keeps cramming more requirements and features into the design docs while IT is trying to play keep-up while still keeping everything else running (while adding features to the old system as well). Apparently the last CIO that tried to tell the business that practice wasn't sustainable was invited to seek opportunities elsewhere. We get resumes from that IT shop every week.

Terry

Guess we could call Alabama the COBOL system maintenance capital of the country...

We've been called much worse in the deep south, wouldn't phase us!

RogueProeliator wrote:

Guess we could call Alabama the COBOL system maintenance capital of the country...

We've been called much worse in the deep south, wouldn't phase us!

Man that is SO true!

Terry

Back to the multi-line text fields. Is it still on the to do list?

The latest update to the GhostXML plugin shows a way to do this. There are literal multiple lines in the XML.

Code: Select all

            <Field id="curlArray" type="textfield" tooltip="Please enter your curl commands, which will be appended to the url above." visibleBindingId="useDigest" visibleBindingValue="Raw">
                <Label>Curl Commands:







                </Label>
            </Field>


peszko wrote:

Back to the multi-line text fields. Is it still on the to do list?

Yes.