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Can any of you seasoned COBOL programmers in here please point to the best learning resources for this? I would love to learn it but I don’t have any old IBM ma

Can any of you seasoned COBOL programmers in here please point to the best learning resources for this? I would love to learn it but I don’t have any old IBM mainframes lying around.

my_usernam3 7y ago
Pretty sure you can practice locally on any machine. The few people I know working with COBOL use virtual machines on modern computers before pushing to production. Also, I'm sure if you search "COBOL tutorials" on the engine of choice, you'll find tons of stuff.
rbanffy 7y ago
GNU COBOL runs on pretty much anything. You can play with it right now. No need for a mainframe. In fact, a lot of COBOL code running these days is not running on mainframes. Mainframes are not big Unix boxes. Their OSs were evolving for decades before Unix booted for the first time and are very different from anything most people have direct experience with. You can boot up a legal copy of MVS 3.8j (or an illegal one of its modern descendant z/OS) but expect a learning curve. You can also get something similar from Unisys for their Clearpath machines.
- Aloha 7y ago
  The thing that struck me from coming from a unix background was that the entire OS was record aware, all the native tools, everything. Stuff that is just hard in unix is trivial in z/OS
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - Taniwha 7y ago
    Having grown up in the older 'record aware' systems unix bytestreams were a wonderful breath of fresh air (this was back in v6/v7) - I guess perspective is everything
    - rbanffy 7y ago
      Being record aware comes from the punched cards that were the most popular way to keep data when they started evolving. They were born before ASCII (they use EBCDIC and, while ASCII was supported in one early IBM 360 model, it was dropped almost immediately) Unix was born after magnetic storage, both disk and tape, were common. A file looks a lot like a tape.
      - Aloha 7y ago
        System/360 was supposed to be ASCII from the get go, the architecture supports it (the RCA Spectra 70 series which was a System/360 architecture system was ASCII). All System/360 descendants support ASCII, the issue they ran into early in the System/360 program was accessories, IBM had lots of EBCDIC I/O devices, and developing a line of ASCII I/O devices would have delayed introduction of the line by a period of time.
        rbanffy 7y ago
        The USASCII-8 mode bit in the program status word existed in all 360's (sorry about that) but was removed in the 370.
    - Aloha 7y ago
      Ideally I want both things.
- greenyoda 7y ago
  > Mainframes are not big Unix boxes. Actually, these days, they can be: > However, z/OS also supports 64-bit Java, C, C++, and UNIX (Single UNIX Specification) APIs and applications through UNIX System Services – The Open Group certifies z/OS as a compliant UNIX operating system – with UNIX/Linux-style hierarchical HFS and zFS file systems. As a result, z/OS hosts a broad range of commercial and open source software. z/OS can communicate directly via TCP/IP, including IPv6, and includes standard HTTP servers (one from Lotus, the other Apache-derived) along with other common services such as FTP, NFS, and CIFS/SMB. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/OS#Major_characteristics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/OS#Major_characteristics
  - rbanffy 7y ago
    Oh yes. And, thanks to that wonderful hardware, they are really fast ones. Still, unless you are running a Unix like OS directly on an LPAR, you can't completely ignore the z/OS personality.

Can any of you seasoned COBOL programmers in here please point to the best learning resources for this? I would love to learn it but I don’t have any old IBM mainframes lying around.

my_usernam3 7y ago

Pretty sure you can practice locally on any machine. The few people I know working with COBOL use virtual machines on modern computers before pushing to production. Also, I'm sure if you search "COBOL tutorials" on the engine of choice, you'll find tons of stuff.

rbanffy 7y ago

GNU COBOL runs on pretty much anything. You can play with it right now. No need for a mainframe. In fact, a lot of COBOL code running these days is not running on mainframes. Mainframes are not big Unix boxes. Their OSs were evolving for decades before Unix booted for the first time and are very different from anything most people have direct experience with. You can boot up a legal copy of MVS 3.8j (or an illegal one of its modern descendant z/OS) but expect a learning curve. You can also get something similar from Unisys for their Clearpath machines.

Aloha 7y ago
The thing that struck me from coming from a unix background was that the entire OS was record aware, all the native tools, everything. Stuff that is just hard in unix is trivial in z/OS
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Taniwha 7y ago
  Having grown up in the older 'record aware' systems unix bytestreams were a wonderful breath of fresh air (this was back in v6/v7) - I guess perspective is everything
  - rbanffy 7y ago
    Being record aware comes from the punched cards that were the most popular way to keep data when they started evolving. They were born before ASCII (they use EBCDIC and, while ASCII was supported in one early IBM 360 model, it was dropped almost immediately) Unix was born after magnetic storage, both disk and tape, were common. A file looks a lot like a tape.
    - Aloha 7y ago
      System/360 was supposed to be ASCII from the get go, the architecture supports it (the RCA Spectra 70 series which was a System/360 architecture system was ASCII). All System/360 descendants support ASCII, the issue they ran into early in the System/360 program was accessories, IBM had lots of EBCDIC I/O devices, and developing a line of ASCII I/O devices would have delayed introduction of the line by a period of time.
      - rbanffy 7y ago
        The USASCII-8 mode bit in the program status word existed in all 360's (sorry about that) but was removed in the 370.
  - Aloha 7y ago
    Ideally I want both things.
greenyoda 7y ago
> Mainframes are not big Unix boxes. Actually, these days, they can be: > However, z/OS also supports 64-bit Java, C, C++, and UNIX (Single UNIX Specification) APIs and applications through UNIX System Services – The Open Group certifies z/OS as a compliant UNIX operating system – with UNIX/Linux-style hierarchical HFS and zFS file systems. As a result, z/OS hosts a broad range of commercial and open source software. z/OS can communicate directly via TCP/IP, including IPv6, and includes standard HTTP servers (one from Lotus, the other Apache-derived) along with other common services such as FTP, NFS, and CIFS/SMB. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/OS#Major_characteristics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/OS#Major_characteristics
- rbanffy 7y ago
  Oh yes. And, thanks to that wonderful hardware, they are really fast ones. Still, unless you are running a Unix like OS directly on an LPAR, you can't completely ignore the z/OS personality.