Thursday March 02 1995, Christopher Weimann writes to Mark Shumway:

 CW> Pardon a stupid question but what is CICS?  I know its origins are in the
 CW> mainframe world but little else.  I have been told that is it
 CW> comunications software,

Essentially, it is a terminal handler for IBM mainframes in a transaction
processing environment. Its use it now being developed to provide similar
transaction processing in a client/server configuration, and it is being
ported to number of different platforms.

 CW> but everthing I read seems to indicate it is a database manager.

No, it merely provides a user interface to a DBMS such as DB2 or ADABAS, or
any other data files you care to develop. If using a DBMS, this will be
running in a seperate address space or as a separate process, and CICS will
interact with it using some IPC mechanism for passing data between the two
programs.

 CW> Can it be used alone without COBOL?

COBOL is one of the supported development languages, the others being C, and PL/I.

 CW> What does CICS stand for?

Customer Information Control System.

In the UK it is pronounced kicks, but Americans seem to prefer see-eye-see-ess.

John

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