On 2019-06-14 7:58 AM, Mike Shaw wrote:
CVAF is much slower than BSAM, alphabetical order or not. EXCP with
chained CCWs is much faster, then just sort the DSNs yourself.
In the "LOAD/LINK exit" thread, Graeme mentioned the products named
Dorana and SoftAudit.
SoftAudit was from Isogon (who also produced SPIFFY and probably other
products I can't recall). Isogon was acquired by IBM, around the 2005
time frame.
Dorana was started by Ubiquity because they could not get a good
distribution deal for SoftAudit in Australia. I wrote the first program
for it in 1996, which was the DASD scanner.
SoftAudit could not make a new sale outside the US pretty much so IBM
acquired the Dorana product in 2006 with a view to kill the competition,
at least as we thought. (Dorana could not be sold in the US because of a
lack of funds to bust a patent which Isogon did not actually use, but
for which it was assumed they would claim infringement. It was thought
that if the funds were available then the patent could almost certainly
be busted, but that, of course, remains conjecture. That particular
patent has now expired.)
In 2007 I was hired (in Australia) by IBM New York because, it turns
out, they thought I was someone else. (I think that's funny.)
Unfortunately for them, I was not the C++ coder who wrote the one bit of
Dorana they were interested in - a component called the Match Engine -
but merely an assembler guy, and they already had lots of assembler
talent. (I also do a bit of PL/I. The current IBM product still ships a
couple of PL/I programs - probably a rarity these days.)
But a contract is a contract, and so I was still on the books when IBM
grew dissatisfied with the ex-Isogon team to the extent that they gave
the whole project to IBM ADL.
The ADL team preferred Dorana over SoftAudit (perhaps they thought DB2
was superior to ISPF tables as a scalable DBMS), and were happy enough
to retain the services of an original developer.
IBM had renamed SoftAudit to Tivoli License Compliance Manager for z/OS,
or TLCMz for short. Dorana was renamed to Tivoli Asset Discovery for
z/OS which I was told had no official abbreviation but the unofficial
one of TADz soon became its de facto handle.
(Actually, the original IBM name for it was Hardware and Software
Identification for z/OS or HSIz for the limited release of 7.1, but by
7.2 it was TADz. It still uses the component prefix of HSI.)
And now I finally get to the thread relevance - reading VTOCs. When I
wrote the "Inquisitor" as I called it, it used a routine sourced from an
Amdahl SE-supplied program called SUPERLST, which was really just a
version of XVTCLIST as found on the CBT tape.
The relevant subroutine - XVTCREAD - uses a CCW chain to read an entire
track in a single EXCP, so this seemed like a good routine to use - even
better because it was in the public domain, put there by a couple of
very large US corporations who had separately donated the code to the
CBT tape in the 1980s.
As TLCMz level 3 from 2008 until it went EOS in 2010, I was interested
to see that they had used the same routine in their DASD scanner - the
"Surveyor".
So, XVTCREAD - the VTOC reading routine originally written around
1966/1967 - has given and is still giving grand service today in 2019,
over 50 years later. Now that's compatibility!
Cheers,
Greg
Disclaimer: The recollections, views and opinions stated above are my
own and do not represent any official statement. No guarantees as to
their accuracy are given.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
