Hello David!

Monday August 12 1996 from David Noon 2:440/4 to Harry Bush:

 DN> I've moved this to OS2PROG, since it isn't about REXX. I don't want
 DN> to incur the moderator's wrath.

Sure.

 DN> As you can see, this is a "corporate customer" mentality
in IBM, not
 DN> a "retail product" one. MVS customers accept it, but OS/2 customers
 DN> mostly find it strange.

I think nowadays it might be simply strange for everybody.  Technology
has changed.  No more huge 9-track tapes with only 1600 bpi... Remember
current CD prices... :-)) There is even no necessity to make huge CD
series,  CD-Recordables will do.  For most products, one CD-R disk will
be tenfold enough... and empty 650 Mb CD-R costs below $10 even in small
amounts.  I can easily imagine somebody preparing CD image when current
CSD level changes, and then simply record it when customer is detected ;)
PL/I is not exactly such a mass product as Doom... I doubt they sell
more than 5 packages a day, that means 1 person can do it all, including
packaging, for whole our planet (assuming all manuals are also on the
same CD, corrected to the same CSD).

 DN> Buy your compiler (from a reseller, not IBM) and apply the
 DN> maintenance yourself.

Resellers - even big ones like Mensys in Europe - do not have PL/I in
stock, they only offer to order it.  That's why I spoke about CD-R's:
in less then hour there could be prepared (from image) fresh new CD
at current CSD level.  I could make this on my home machine... why IBM
can't?...  Oh yes, they would involve 200 people in "production process"
and produce pile of obsolete diskettes...  Hell, even Indelible Blue
didn't have PL/I for OS/2 for sale last year at ColoradOS/2 conference,
and I must say they had quite acceptable presence there... I purchased
several excellent products for special prices ;-)

 DN> The throughput of the IBM ftp server is usually pretty good, but
 DN> I'll bet it's slow at the moment because OS/2 FP22 has just been
 DN> released.

I know... installed it last week... :-((

 DN> Everything else would run unmodified. None of the code is less than
 DN> 18 years old. The punched cards I used for source are getting a
 DN> little tatty though. ... :-)

Wow, how do you get punched cards into PC?  Ah, maybe you simply have some
mainframe available and PC linked to it via some kind of "blue glue" :-)
I still have some 9-track 800 BPI tapes - relict from VM/SP times but
regard them mostly as souveniers now... Oh yes, I did really program
in PL/I ...

Best wishes,                                   Harry
                              Wednesday August 14 1996 05:03
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