I just weighed the one almost-full box of some old programs and data
cards that I have retained for show-and-tell over the years, and it is a
little over 8 lbs. Since the cards have holes punched, have some
lighter cardboard spacers, and new cards pack more tightly, I would
estimate 10 lbs as a better approximation for a box of 2000 unused cards.
Before we started conversion from DOS/VSE to MVS in 1985, all our
production JCL was on cards in several card filing cabinets. My
recollection is that a cabinet drawer could hold around two boxes of
cards, so the maximum capacity of one cabinet might have been on the
order of 40 boxes of cards. We could easily have had somewhere in the
neighborhood of 0.5 - 1.0 tons of cards containing JCL. A larger shop
might literally have had several tons of JCL.
Joel C. Ewing
On 12/01/2015 02:41 PM, Barry Merrill wrote:
> I think a box of 2000 IBM cards is on the order of 6 pounds,
> so a TON of JCL cards would be 333 boxes, or about 666,666
> card images.
>
> But, the useful weight is zero, since we only use the holes.
>
> Barry
>
>
> Herbert W. "Barry" Merrill, PhD
> President-Programmer
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>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On
> Behalf Of Farley, Peter x23353
> Sent: Tuesday, December 01, 2015 1:59 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine
> hardware architecture level?]
>
> Re: "ton" of JCL, at least one large shop of my prior acquaintance (20 or so
> years ago) had over 250,000 members in the production applications JCL
> libraries.
>
> Not sure how much of that was obsolete at the time, but the batch operations
> control product they used had vast quantities of data as well.
>
> I think that counts as a "ton" or 2 . . . :)
>
> Peter
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On
> Behalf Of Peter Relson
> Sent: Tuesday, December 01, 2015 9:30 AM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?
>
> <Snipped>
>
> . . . migrating from Cobol 4 to Cobol 5 without changing a ton of JCL (how
> much JCL is a "ton" anyway?).
>
> --
--
Joel C. Ewing, Bentonville, AR [email protected]
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