Like Tony, I come from a VSE background and mostly lurk here.
When I came to Peoria, IL, to work for Ruppman Marketing, I was told more or less the same story but about BetaCom [not sure of the spelling]. The way that I got it, was that this product was in a development competition with what became CICS. Ruppman Marketing had a marketing effort doing 800 calls for business. Back in the day, they were the world's largest 800 answering service. We needed a fairly quick and light-weight TP Monitor. At the time, the prevailing notion was that CICS was a hog and Ruppman did not want to invest in enough processor to support it. So they went with BetaCom. The main developer of BetaCom, and later owner, Benjt something or other, worked for IBM in a development competition with CICS. When CICS was chosen to be the strategic product, he left and took BetaCom with him. He had moderate success in North America. He would come to town in order solve some code issue. Afterwords, he and a number of others from the systems and operations staff would then go and party. A lot of those people were still there when I started in 1982. Last that I kenw, back in the VSE (pre-ESA) days, they were a rapidly diminishing number of US customers, most of what was left was in Europe. I would think that with VSE/ESA, they would be mostly out of business. In the day, I did a little bit of application work in BetaCom. All Assembler (circa 1982). Oddities like the 'approved' way to return to TP monitor was to take an Operation Exception on a half word of zeros. Anyway, just felt like I had a story to relate here. G A Sansom Tony, haven't talked with you since WAVV, maybe 21 or so years ago. Tony Thigpen<t...@vse2pdf.com> wrote on 3/30/20: Digging back into my mind for data from 1983: Third National of Nashville (TNB) ran a bank data processing site in Florence, AL. The main bank there was First National (FNB). TNB decided to close up shop in Florence so FNB took their data processing in-house. FNB did not have a data processing department before this. I was one of three programmers hired by FNB for this new department. The complete staff from the TNB site was hired by FNB with the permission of TNB as the operational staff. We converted the data from TNB in-house written code to a set of programs from an Orlando base software provider Financial Software of America (FSA), later bought by UCC to become part of the new UCCEL company, later acquired by CA and so forth. The one system FSA did not have yet, but we needed, was a loan processing package. (They were writing it, but it was not yet available.) TNB decided to give FNB the complete source for their Loan System. It was in assembler and I was tasked to convert it from MVS (or what ever at that time) to DOS/SIPO (predecessor to z/VSE). What I found was interesting. The system used something called VISAM, or "variable length ISAM". It was not a big problem to convert it to VSAM, but here is the story I got about VISAM. I was told that when IBM was looking for a replacement for ISAM, that two competing groups generated two options for the replacement. One was to become known as VSAM, the other was this VISAM product. Well, we all know that VSAM was IBM's future. The main guy pushing VISAM got mad and left IBM and ended up at TNB of Nashville. He was one of the main programmers for their loan system (and maybe others). And, when he left IBM he took his VISAM stuff, refined it and incorporated it into TNB's software. It's been a long time since I did the conversion. But, as I remember it, the code was all based on macros in the assembler and was really clean. Well, that's the story I got. I don't know if it as true or just BS, but the VISAM product really did exist and was used for serious banking. A side note: The source was provided to FNB as a tape backup from a Panvalet library. I had to write a program to decompress the backup (from MVS) into a DOS supported format to be stored in ICCF. That, in itself, was a fun project and was not that hard in Cobol, once the patten of the compression was determined. Tony Thigpen Boy, am I getting old. --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
