[HECnet] FMS, SMG$, Windowing/Forms on a Text Terminal

[Mark Wickens]

On 01/10/2013 10:41, Jordi Guillaumes i Pons wrote:
El 01/10/2013, a les 11:10, Mark Wickens <mark at wickensonline.co.uk> va escriure:

I understand where you're coming from Sampsa with regards to forms on text terminals. I've always found applications that do this strangely fascinating for no particular reason.

I remember back around 1992 when I was working for Cyberscience one of the lead developers wrote a terminal based application to create database queries visually and I thought it was just so cool!
DEC had several products which did forms. FMS was the oldest and IIRC the most extended. Then there was also TDMS and DecForms, which was very, very powerful but vastly complicated. I used it, and have to confess I liked it. A lot.

Then there was a product called RALLY, which was a 4G system to do database applications. It generated automatically database maintenance forms, including hyerarchical formats. It had a pascal-ish programming languange to do scripting and non-forms logic. I liked that one too (albeit it was slow as hell).

I also worked at the PPA in Newcastle around the 2000s which was an IBM mainframe shop. The JCL boys were a law unto themselves and it was clear they would have a job for life all the time no one switched off the big iron. I'm drawn to the esoteric so found that environment equally interesting, although I would be totally clueless to how it is driven.
That is job security thru obscurity. Believe me, JCL is _NOT_ that hard. It has basically four instructions (JOB, EXEC, PROC and DD) and their corresponding parameters, which if you read the docs can seem like a lot... until you realize you will be using just a small subset in real life.


Jordi Guillaumes i Pons
jg at jordi.guillaumes.name
HECnet: BITXOV::JGUILLAUMES




Very interesting! I have played a little with SMG$ as part of Retrochallenge, and looked at the other projects, but as hinted there is a steep learning curve with a lot of the products that is bound to put most off.

Your last comment made me think of a job interview I had at the Skandia factory who were a big IBM user in Luton when I was leaving University. After the interview I was quietly told that although they thought I was fantastic that I'd be better off getting a job somewhere else as working there would 'bore me to tears'!

-- 
    http://www.wickensonline.co.uk
    http://hecnet.eu
    http://declegacy.org.uk
    http://retrochallenge.net
    https://twitter.com/#!/%40urbancamo