It’s been just over a year since I complained about not having an interesting project to play with. OK I added interesting. I’ve had a few ideas but it’s been a slow year for good ideas. The most recent one of reading a IBM client tape using Basic-Plus in RSTS/E using the simh emulator, was very enjoyable to me. This is something we (our company) did on a daily basis, because we received client tapes which were mostly…actually it might have been totally in an IBM tape format.
Now emulation is very cool to me. However I see no need to put endless hours, honing my RSTS/E or TK4- (MVS) skills, because what will it get me? I use Python for most everyday problems, is there ever a Time where I think IBM Cobol or Basic-Plus would be a better choice to solve everyday problems? NO! Even the tools I use to help me do things on TK4-, are usually written in Python or Go. I think gnuCOBOL is very cool. But is it better than Python or Go for just about any project today? NO!
When I first learned about TK4- (MVS) I thought…cool. But i don’t want to create a test database of 20 or 100 records. How realistic is that? So for me it was very important to figure out how to process larger more realistic datasets. And I did that! I talk about it here, here and here. And probably a few more places. So I proved to myself that MVS running in TK4- was up to the task of handling real world data. At least in simple batch jobs. However in real world use you need to be able to put data in a database. At one time VSAM was very familiar to me. But today I look at it and it just looks confusing. And I don’t want to re-familiarize myself with it.
Now if a real IBM database, DB2 was available I would jump at the chance to learn and use that. Because it’s based on SQL, which I’m fairly familiar with. But that would just lead to wanting to be able to access that data on a terminal. And I have little interest in KICKS that runs in VM (CMS). Jay Mosley has also written an interesting article on it. However in writing this paragraph I learned that KICKS also runs in TSO, which I guess has been true, but for some reason it just flew over my head. So perhaps that would be a great project to look into. As a matter of fact Jay Mosley’s article is about installing it in MVS. The current version of KICKS is 1.5.0 from 2014…almost 10 years ago.