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  • Re: What Is Unix? (was: H

    From MIKE POWELL@VERT/CAPCITY2/UUMOES to ANTHK on Wed Jan 14 08:46:00 2026
    Damn, I'd love to start with as/400, because I can't grasp the
    concept of objects and libraries and the like. It's like a
    weird VMS/NT to the extreme. Yes, I'm learning Cobol because
    of an $JOB. For the rest I can just use GCobol for prototyping
    and perfectly fine under my OpenBSD netbook; but in order
    to get employed I truly need at least to know the basics of
    AS/400.

    I was briefly a backup operator on an AS/400. I didn't learn much about
    the programming side, but I think they were using RPG on ours.

    I was a mainframe COBOL programmer for ~26 years. They hired me and sent
    me to a class. As COBOL reads a lot like english, I found it easy to pick
    up. You do have to remember to define all of your variables in working storage, which is different than many other languages.

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  • From poindexter FORTRAN@VERT/REALITY to MIKE POWELL on Thu Jan 15 08:15:44 2026
    MIKE POWELL wrote to ANTHK <=-

    I was briefly a backup operator on an AS/400. I didn't learn much
    about the programming side, but I think they were using RPG on ours.

    Yeah, I think most development had moved to RPG by that time.

    I worked for a catalog/retail company that did all of their compute on
    3 S/36s and 2 AS/400s. I administered the PC side of the company, so I
    got login rights to the AS/400s and could bring networks up and down -
    later found out that I could have re-IPLed the system with my creds!

    This was interesting - my first job out of college, with a
    raised-floor, glassed-off server room with line printers, midrange
    computers, and a big red button for the halon system - very
    intimidating, very cool.

    I picked up enough RPG/4 and REXX (OS/2's batch language) to forget it
    later.



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  • From Mortar@VERT/EOTLBBS to MIKE POWELL on Thu Jan 15 15:34:35 2026
    Re: Re: What Is Unix? (was: H
    By: MIKE POWELL to ANTHK on Wed Jan 14 2026 08:46:00

    As COBOL reads a lot like english, I found it easy to pick up. You do have to remember to define all of your variables in working storage...

    COBOL was my favorite language. I learned it in the mid-'70s using an IBM 370/158; COBOL 74 was the dialect. Yeah, you had to watch that Data Division, but the Procedure Div. could be even more treacherous. One mis-placed special character can generate a multitude of error msgs. In fact we used to hold contests (unofficially, of course) on who could generate the most. I never came close to the record, which I believe was over 200 errors, just because a comma was used instead of a period, I forget how.

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