Fort Huachuca is in Arizona, and when I was in the Army was the training base 
for some of the communications stuff.  The other communications training was 
Fort Monmouth, New Jersey.

I believe that Fort Huachuca also had some intelligence schools there.  That 
could have been programming classes taught there.  Fort Ben was the 
administrative and financial training base.

Lloyd



----- Original Message ----
From: Ed Gould <edgould1...@comcast.net>
To: IBM-MAIN@bama.ua.edu
Sent: Wed, April 18, 2012 1:03:56 AM
Subject: Re: GO TO "cobol"

Loyd:

Fort Wauchooka (sp??) rings a bell somewhere in my cob  ridden memory. But I 
also now remember Ft Ben Harrison (now). I remember the guys talking about the 
desert and thats about all.

Ed

On Apr 17, 2012, at 7:17 AM, Lloyd Fuller wrote:

> In 1969, and until sometime in the 1970s or later, the Army programming school
> was at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana.
> 
> 
> Graduated in March 1969 as a Staff Sergeant converted to a SP6.  Programming
> since then.
> 
> lLOYD
> 
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Ed Gould <edgould1...@comcast.net>
> To: IBM-MAIN@bama.ua.edu
> Sent: Tue, April 17, 2012 12:16:33 AM
> Subject: Re: GO TO "cobol"
> 
> On Apr 16, 2012, at 8:34 AM, McKown, John wrote:
>> ----------------SNIP---------------------------------
>> Also remember that COBOL, at least originally, was supposed to be very
>> English-like and so usable by people at the Army PFC level of training.
>> 
>> --John McKown
>> Systems Engineer IV
>> IT
> 
> Hmmm... I was in the Army and we got PFC's from the programming school (AZ? 
its
> been 40 years so forgive me). We had two groups, one COBOL (batch processing)
> and one ASM group (essentially sysprogs). The ASM group was by far the best 
>IMO.
> I was on call quite often and had to "fix" the cobol programs that went boom 
in
> the middle of the night. The COBOL people were semi useless in debugging and
> when I looked at the code they had produced (except for a few people) it was
> hopeless to understand. I spent more time trying to figure out the logic and
> compare what I was seeing in the dump. 1/3 the time I helped the programmer
> figure out where his problem was and supplying answers to his questions on 
what
> was in this field or that field.
> What was interesting was that as the guys (no female programmers so don't call
> me sexist blame the Army not me) as they became more experienced the code 
>became
> easier to follow. As they became became better programmers there were less 
>logic
> problems. Now having said that most of the programs were  smallish and only a
> few were considered large so the smallish programs there was no excuse for 
>logic
> issues or mangled code. My memory is foggy here as to goto's but I think the
> "rule" no standards if memory serves me that goto's were to be minimized as a
> result flow was easier to follow and frankly debugging was easier.
> 
> Ed
> 
> ps: We had one person who at the time he was drafted was working for IBM and 
he
> privately told me about some OS enhancements that when I first heard I 
couldn't
> wrap my head around as virtual (at least that I had never heard of) was a
> nightmare that I couldn't wrap my head around. After I got out of the Army (2
> years) IBM announced Virtual and I was able to ask some semi intelligent
> questions as my "preview" and the questions helped jump start by job.
> 
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