IBM Blues
I was thinking about the way my first employer, Compuware acted after we had finished the Y2K testing project in Brussels. They were left with this oddball team of mainframe junkies and they had no idea what to do with us. They had only one sales person trying to sell our team part time and they treated us like dirt, refusing to give us our own PCs and forcing us to “hot desk” etc. I remember that we were told off for reading the newspaper in the office when there was simply nothing else to do. We’d go off and play cards in an empty meeting room.
Of course you can’t put up with that for long and everybody left after a couple of months, just what they wanted. I came to Belgium and the rest of the team joined a competitor in the city. I think many of them were happy to get out of Slough and into central London.
I think I was the only one of the team actually interested in the technical workings of MVS. I bought this extremely expensive book in Foyles :-
I even got into Rexx programming and wrote a very bad version of Hangman for the terminal. Looking back through old floppies I couldn’t find any of my own JCL so here’s a bit from Wikipedia :-
//IS198CPY JOB (IS198T30500),’COPY JOB’,CLASS=L,MSGCLASS=X
//COPY01 EXEC PGM=IEBGENER
//SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT=*
//SYSUT1 DD DSN=OLDFILE,DISP=SHR
//SYSUT2 DD DSN=NEWFILE,
// DISP=(NEW,CATLG,DELETE),
// SPACE=(CYL,(40,5),RLSE),
// DCB=(LRECL=115,BLKSIZE=1150)
//SYSIN DD DUMMY