Yea, you still have to feed the punch. :) -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Kirk Wolf Sent: Tuesday, December 01, 2015 5:44 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: What's a "ton" of JCL? [was:RE: Straightforward way to determine hardware architecture level?]
On Tue, Dec 1, 2015 at 2:41 PM, Barry Merrill <[email protected]> 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 > > <grin> Since this is a thread well suited to reminiscence, I will relay this story. My father managed a very large IBM data center in the 70's. Huge floor space, and a very large room to store blank punched cards. One of the systems programmers who worked there was a cranky joke-ster. He would read every month in the company newsletter about monetary employee suggestion awards handed out for suggestions that he thought were silly and banal. Like: - there is an extra phone on some desk that is not needed - unnecessary copies of some large daily report were being printed - .... The companies policy was that employee suggestions would be reviewed, first by corporate, and then by the line manager in charge of implementation. The employee would get a cash award based on some percentage of the first year's savings. My father gets a call one day from a very excited guy in corporate. He says that this systems programmer has submitted a suggestion that will save many tens of thousands of dollars a year in the data center. The suggestion was something like: ========================================================= We store millions of blank punched cards so that they are available when needed for the data center. I have designed and written two assembler programs (see listings attached) that allow us to eliminate this storage requirement. - The first program allows us to read and store a "master image" of a single blank punched card, electronically, on spinning magnetic disk. - The second program can be run, whenever needed, to punch out blank cards from the image stored on disk. A parameter card specifies the count of how many blank cards to punch. ... ========================================================= My father had to gently explain to the corporate guy how he had been suckered. Cheers, Kirk Wolf Dovetailed Technologies http://dovetail.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ========================== This email, and any files transmitted with it, is confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to which it is addressed. If you have received this email in error, please notify the system manager. This message contains confidential information and is intended only for the individual named. If you are not the named addressee, you should not disseminate, distribute or copy this e-mail. Please notify the sender immediately by e-mail if you have received this message by mistake and delete this e-mail from your system. If you are not the intended recipient, you are notified that disclosing, copying, distributing or taking any action in reliance on the contents of this information is strictly prohibited. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
