IBMs VM/370

Continuing retro. Now using the hercules emulator for IBM Mainframes and also the 3270 terminal emulator. Here’s VM/370,  IBM’s first version, released in 1972…way before Linux knew what a VM was or, for that matter, the world knew what Linux was. This is very much like the VM systems I was employed to maintain…

SQLite

I’ve been working with computers for over 30 years and I still am amazed at how fast they are. I do these little exercises every now and then to remind myself. I ran a Python program I wrote to create real “looking” customer data. It uses sqlite databases of first name, last name and zip …

GnuCOBOL

Continuing my look at COBOL. Previously I had typed/compiled/ran the customary “hello world” program to test the compiler. But wanted to learn to read/write typical PC files with variable length records with each line terminated with a CR. The mainframe programs I’ve written in the past always used blocked/fixed length records. Success! I’m rusty but …

Lazarus

In the past I tried and really liked Lazarus. I had to learn Lazarus AND Pascal…and I enjoyed the process. Lazarus made me want to learn Pascal. I have been using Linux exclusively for years, Lazarus seemed to be a superior replacement from Visual Basic which I use to use on MS-Windows. Recently I was …