Long ago in a galaxy far away, I was a systems programmer at a CDC 6400 site. The ALGOL 60 compiler for SCOPE was written in COMPASS, and the logic manual consisted solely of a translation of the compiler into *UNCOMMENTED* ALGOL. A CDC rep couldn't understand why I found hat unhelpful.
-- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of Bob Bridges [robhbrid...@gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, May 23, 2023 4:43 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Are you serious about wanting a better IBM doc RCF-type process? Yes! I've heard a lot of complaints about IBM documentation being confusing, and I know it's impossible to make EVERYTHING clear. But one thing I've said over and over again for decades: I may have to search the manuals for a long time to find what I'm looking for, but I can be pretty confident that the information is in there somewhere! Not so with other products. Not that the competing documentation is ~all~ crap. But no one matches IBM in this regard. --- A quick story. (Well, maybe not so quick.) An insurance company got mad at CA and decided to dump all CA products and replace them with others: Control-M, Zeke/Zebb/Zara and so forth. They hired me to figure out what security rules existed for the CA products and what matching rules would be required for the new ones. This involved a lot of talking on the phone to tech support at the various publishers. Usually my question(s) would be pushed up to tier 2 and 3 before garnering an answer, and in the interim my original contact would sometimes disappear, having left the company or moved to another area; then I'd have to start over. At one point, while talking to a tier-3 guy about the new tape-management system, I got tired of explaining my questions to him and wrote out a pseudocode decision table, showing all the possible combinations and how each one was to be addressed: Non-numeric tape VOLSERs, foreign tapes, unnamed DSs, DSs with special dates, I don't know what-all (it was almost 30 years ago). At four places in the pseudocode I inserted questions: "On p37 the documentation says this, but on 105 it says this." "Here the documentation says this, but what the heck does that mean?" "I see no place in the documentation that explains how to handle this combination of factors." There must be, I reasoned, some guy at the company who had helped write the product and could answer those four questions. Great, said my tier-3 contact, this is what I need to get you your answers. He hung up, and disappeared. I never heard from him again. I had to start over again. A month later I had new tier-3 guy, and brought up the same question: Surely you have some kind of decision table that explains how each situation is handled? (It seemed so obvious that there should be something like that.) Yeah, he said, I've seen something like that around here. I'll find a copy and send it to you. Some of you know where this is going. When the "decision table" arrived, it was a photocopy of mine; same printer (I think it was a DECWriter), same order, same four questions (none answered). --- Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313 /* If ye make indentures with God how much ye will serve Him, ye shall find ye have signed both of them yourself. -Thomas More */ -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On Behalf Of Steve Thompson Sent: Tuesday, May 23, 2023 15:19 Decades ago someone said to me, as I complained about an index issue (something I thought should have been in the index) -- "Why don't you go read the manuals for competing systems to IBM's mainframes and let me know what you think of their non-existent Index and barely adequate table of contents." Well, it wasn't too long after that that I had the opportunity to work on a project where we had Univac systems. I realized how much better IBM's manuals were. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
