Decades ago I used PL/I multitasking to recover/read data from a failing disk drive that was about to be decommissioned. Mother task started daughter task to read data, notice when it ABENDed, calculate next alphanumeric database record key to try to read, and start reader task again. It recovered enough data to make whatever government agency owned it happy. PL/I was (is?) a great language, especially using Optimizing and Checkout compilers together.
Robert Prins<[email protected]> 9 Sep 2025 wrote: On Tue, 9 Sept 2025 at 15:15, Gary Weinhold < [email protected]> wrote:
Although perhaps Pipes will never be used much on z/OS, with PL/I and now COBOL v6.3 supporting multi-threading, the performance system programmers will soon have to be aware that application programmers may introduce multi-tasking in batch job steps and possibly TSO. Parenthetically, over 20 years ago we worked with a credit card processor who had a production multitasking application under TSO.
The old OS PL/I Optimizing Compiler supported multi-tasking out-of-the-box, at least 35 years ago, and I actually used that feature to make two long-running programs operator interruptible, probably the most simple type of multitasking possible, just start a second task that issues a WTOR and then goes to sleep. -- Gabriel Goldberg, Computers and Publishing, [email protected] 3401 Silver Maple Place, Falls Church, VA 22042 (703) 204-0433 LinkedIn:http://www.linkedin.com/in/gabegold ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
