Excerpted from message dated 08-17-96, David Noon to Murray Lesser:

DN>I haven't looked at Dev Con 10 yet. I'm glad they are starting to put
  >the maintenance on there. It's just that CSD#6 and Toolkit CSD#2 are
  >about 4 or 5 months old now. I've already got CSD#7 installed for the
  >compiler and am looking to get CSD#3 for the toolkit.

Hi David--

    I don't know the time lag on DevCon deliveries between here and
there, but the "SERVICES" directory file on DevCon 10, Disc 1 (the one
with the PL/I CSDs in it) is dated late March, and I think I got the
volume in late May or early June.  (DevCon 11 should arrive any day
now!)  My FTPed files of Personal Edition CSD#7 are also dated late
March; I assume the issue date for the Professional Edition was probably
slightly earlier, but still may have been too late to make the DevCon 10
deadline, seeing as how it takes so long for one IBM hand to find out
what another one is doing!  It is my understanding that CSD#3 for the
toolkit is the one that brings it up to compiler release 1.2.  Have you
already upgraded?

    Last communique from Carolyn said no decision yet on "promotional
price" for upgrades to 1.2.  (Stay tuned!)  Perhaps I'll wait for fall.
Release 1.1 seems to work fine for what I am doing these days, and I
suppose my utilities can always be recompiled and relinked with 1.2 when
and if.  Actually, I may be better off staying with 1.1!  Switching to
1.2 will mean I have to provide separate libraries to be called by
applications with and without multithreading, something not required
with release 1.1.  (Shades of MS BASIC PDS, which required a separate
library of separately-compiled (or assembled) procedures for each mode
the compiler was capable of--even though the source-code for each was
identical!)

    At the moment, I am contemplating "porting" the full-screen
text-mode "windowing" subroutine library that I wrote for BASIC PDS 7.1,
to PL/I.  That library is a combination of the assembly- and BASIC-coded
procedures that are the heart of the "interactive-interface" of my
most-used record-keeping application (still being run in a VDM!).  I
rewrote some of the screen routines for OS/2 in C (for a piece published
in PC TECHNIQUES and never used otherwise), making VIO calls to replace
the assembled screen stuff, and have also rewritten some of the KBD
(previously assembly) stuff in PL/I.  The originals were written in
1988, but I still have the listings, so I should be able to figure out
those portions that I haven't already redone.

DN>It is a real bummer that Personal Edition is not being upgraded to
  >V1R2. The reason offered was too small a sales volume. When major
  >corporate customers buy Professional Edition in multi-hundred-licence
  >batches to "downsize" their mainframe programmers, it skews the
  >appearance of the sales figures.

    To paraphrase from the hand-wringers on the OS2 conference:  Usual
poor IBM marketing.  Perhaps you just didn't proselyte enough, and I am
the only person who ever bought the Personal Edition. :-(

    Regards,

          --Murray

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