<<snip>>

In my mind still the best business OS out there.

<<end snip>>

Not just in your mind.

MPE still beats the pants off anything out there now -- Unix, Linux, Windows
etc etc..

Bill Gates couldn't dream up MPEiX, TurboIMAGE etc etc even if he were
to live to the age of 3000.....

Brian.


On Thu, 4 Oct 2007 13:36:17 -0700, Eric Sand <[log in to unmask]> 
wrote:

>Hi Folks,
>     Brian stired a few old brain cells when he told the story of
>working in an IBM shop. When I was working for HP Corporate at their
>IBM mainframe DPC at 1501 Page Mill RD(3L was the place) back in
>1972, I was trying to create the equivalent of passing info from one
>process to another without creating a file and when I approached the
>IBM sytems programmer about it, his first response was "Why would you
>want to do that?". He missed the whole point. It was because I could
>imagine it and it would make a very clean solution to my problem. A
>year later I transferred to HP's MSD/OED division down the street and
>when they decided to become the first HP division to go with the
>HP3000CX I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. In my mind still the
>best business OS out there.
>
>         Eric Sand
>
>
>Begin forwarded message:
>
>> From: Brian Donaldson <[log in to unmask]>
>> Date: October 4, 2007 12:39:54 PM PDT
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] KSAMXL Question/Problem -- Key Info
>> (Continued)
>> Reply-To: Brian Donaldson <[log in to unmask]>
>>
>> Yep, exactly.
>>
>> I need to be able to pass file numbers to FREADLABEL, FWRITELABEL,
>> FGETKEYINFO and also AIF's.... to name a few.
>>
>> The stupid standard COBOL open/read/write/rewrite/close reserved words
>> don't do anything for me.
>>
>> Another thing about intrinsics is that when an intrinsic fails, by
>> calling FCHECK
>> and FERRMSG you get a more sensible error message than COBOL would
>> give
>> you. Who would know what a COBOL error 47 is without having to go
>> look up
>> the manual?
>>
>> Intrinsics (for me, at least) are the only way to go..........
>>
>> Once upon a time, in a previous lifetime I worked in an IBM shop
>> that had a
>> RISC6000/AIX box using Microfocus COBOL. I have been so used to
>> working
>> on the HP3000 for so long it was a major shock when I discovered just
>> how "stupid" that IBM box really is compared to the intelligent
>> HP3000.
>> I asked one of the IBM programmer's how I would find out what the
>> EOF on
>> a file was. "What system intrinsics do you use to get file info
>> without having to
>> read thru a trillion records to get a record count?" He looked at
>> me as if I had
>> been beamed down off the Starship Enterprise...
>>
>> No system intrinsics on that box and yes, you would have to read thru
>> the file, adding one to a counter until you hit the eof.
>>
>> However, that is a topic for another posting........
>>
>> Oh yeah, -- I didn't realize I belonged to the "old school"
>> (whatever school that is) -- Eton? Cambridge? Oxford? UCLA? :-)
>>
>>
>> Brian.
>>
>>
>> On Thu, 4 Oct 2007 13:13:51 -0400, Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Robert Mills wrote:
>>>> Brian,
>>>>
>>>> Why are you using FOPEN and not the Cobol Open?
>>>
>>> I'd guess it's an old-school way of keeping a handle on the MPE
>>> filenumber.
>> COBOL didn't always (IIRC) let you use FD names to supply
>> filenumbers to
>> intrinsics (for one), and manually doing your FOPENs/etc let you
>> pass opened
>> files into and out of COBOL subroutines without the default open/
>> close upon
>> subroutine entry/exit like the old-school required.
>>>
>>> Jeff
>>>
>
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