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posted by
Fnord666
on Wednesday December 20 2017, @05:09AM
from the if-you-know-then-you're-old dept.
from the if-you-know-then-you're-old dept.
Many of you have heard about one of the oldest programming languages, COBOL, and you have also heard that COBOL programmers are much asked for nowadays to maintain old legacy code. There's another old-timer which few know about and which is still in use and will be in use for quite a while for applications in various specific fields (i.e. finance, banking, etc.). Its name is IBM RPG.
[...] RPG has been around for more than half a century. By the end of the 1950s, IBM had built a huge number of electromechanical devices called tabulating machines.
Let's talk about IBM RPG.
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A First Look at RPG: Turns Out It's Not Only Role-Playing Games
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The meek shall inherit the earth -- they are too weak to refuse.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 20 2017, @05:33AM (4 children)
Wow, RPG. One of my first potential jobs I got lined up was a place that used RPG II. Now THAT dates me!
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Wednesday December 20 2017, @09:12AM (1 child)
In my first computer-related job, I worked for a company that had a couple of PDP 11s [wikipedia.org] (I'm dating myself, too!) running RSTS/E [wikipedia.org]. Although we did most of our programming using BASIC Plus 2 [wikipedia.org], a rather neat structured programming language with its roots in BASIC, I was told that some of the company's applications were written in RPG II. Fortunately, I never got near such a program!
(Score: 3, Touché) by kazzie on Wednesday December 20 2017, @11:14AM
A bit narcissistic, perhaps, but make sure you take yourself out to a good restaurant.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Wednesday December 20 2017, @03:57PM
Hey, that could have been me too. When I got out of school things were transitioning from punched cards to interactive terminals, and early microcomputers. I could have gone with RPG and Cobol. But these new Microcomputer thingies were just too cool compared to the big dinosaurs. Even an under $10,000 microcomputer could have more memory than a minicomputer costing twenty or more times that.
So I started with a small company writing a specialized accounting system in Pascal (p-System) on Apple II, Apple ///, IBM PC, and Corvus Concept using shared Corvus hard drives. The term LAN seemed very new in the early 1980's. Using p-System meant one source code base ran on all four systems, which could all interact with the same shared database on the Corvus drives. Some people, especially IBM sales people, called these "toy" computers. It was funny how we could bid a $10,000 or $15,000 system up against an vastly more expensive System 36, with superior software with a much nicer text-based "gui". Naturally we worked with Apple and this got us into Lisa and Mac. I can't imagine if I had gone the mainframe / minicomputer route.
I remember one time (about 1984) we demoed our system to some visiting minicomputer technical field support friends to support the local community college. It was funny to observe their deer in the headlights look. You could see it on their faces. "OMG, are we so way behind this tech!"
It is amusing to look back how micro computers ate the mainframes. The rapid growth of both memory size and processing speed was remarkable. And software tech. Languages. Cheap widely available Borland Turbo Pascal. Later inexpensive easy to use C and C++ compilers. Later, GUIs everywhere. Which made me laugh at all the early PC type magazine articles saying that the Mac gui was too impractical in terms of cpu and memory resources to ever become popular.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 20 2017, @05:53PM
My first programming language was RPG II on a PDP-8. Memories indeed.