Ahhhhhhhhh, the halycion days of the 2714 and 2260, before all this jazz, I remember it well.
Earlier this year I had an opportunity to return to those callow years by working again as an COBOL application programmer for a client who had installed FEPI on a massive CICS/DB2 application. They did this so they could *dumb down* the end user job description and hire less expensive customer service staff who only needed to *point and click*, not *type* or even think for that matter. The FEPI application they used was a vendor package that did little more than screen scraping to produce the desired GUI effect. For some strange reason, management simply could not understand why their CPU time had grown astronomically while their transaction volumes had decreased significantly. They were outsourced to IBM and therefore very CPU cost conscious. The increase in CPU time coincided precisely with the cutover from *green screen* to FEPI. The problem was that the FEPI program created transaction paths through scores of CICS *green screens*, so that when the end user clicked a few icons to process just 1 transaction, it triggered dozens of CICS *green screens*, ie CICS transactions. This was very obvious in emulator mode. When you clicked just a few icons to enter a transaction you could see dozens for CICS screens fly by under the covers. So any savings in hiring less expensive customer service staff was more than absorbed by the enormous increase in CPU time charges from IBM. But that was nothing compared with the editing problems introduced by all this into the COBOL application programs. It seems when the vendor installed the *screen scraping* they failed to incorporate the BMS map field editing rules in their window filtering and under FEPI,, BMS is turned off. So the end result was numerous 0C7's because the underlying COBOL application code was expecting BMS to check numeric fields for IF NUMERIC, but BMS was not longer in the picture, no pun intended ;-). So we all spent much of our time adding editing logic into the application programs which had formerly been performed very efficiently by BMS and which now had to be done in the code because the FEPI screen scraper had preempted BMS and failed to incorporate the filtering. It was a very labor-intensive, time-consuming, inefficient process and use of time by both man and machine with a long change control process to go through to implement each fix. All because the end user did not feel like typing or thinking. There is a price to be paid for such a luxury. And . . . "All that glitters is not gold" as this case proved. This company had previously tried to convert their legacy COBOL CICS/DB2 application to client server and failed and had finally resigned themselves and formalized it into company strategic policy, to stay with mainframe COBOL architecture. OOP, UNIX, SQL Server, etc, etc, simply could not do the processing the old structured COBOL CICS/DB2 did. OOP has been likened to going through airport security. FEPI was just an attempt to "put lipstick on the pig" because they could not convert the *pig*. One insurance company I know had some nice new GUI applications, but still had *green screen* for their old main insurance application. I asked them why they had not *put lipstick on this pig*? They said they had thought of doing so, but had done rigorous time and motion studies and had just found that 3270 *green screen* was ergnomically more efficient, at least for this application, if not in general. The idea in the FEPI situation was to *dumb down* the customer service job so the end user did not have to type or even do much thinking. Ergo, GUI is for people who can't type and to some extent either can't or ,at least, don't think. But please do not be offended, because that is not necessarily a bad thing. As other listers have well pointed out, it does open the door for many others who might otherwise not have had a job and it provides a seamless path to higher skills for those who are conscientious enough to take advantage of the opportunity. "Nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so" Shakespeare RPN01 <nix.rob...@mayo.edu> Sent by: The IBM z/VM Operating System <IBMVM@LISTSERV.UARK.EDU> 11/23/2010 02:33 PM Please respond to The IBM z/VM Operating System <IBMVM@LISTSERV.UARK.EDU> To IBMVM@LISTSERV.UARK.EDU cc Subject Re: The old VM/ESA CMS GUI - Does it still live? He said he liked typing, not killing trees... -- Bob Nix On 11/23/10 1:30 PM, "Mark Post" <mp...@novell.com> wrote: >>>> On 11/23/2010 at 10:19 AM, George Henke/NYLIC >>>> <george_he...@newyorklife.com> > wrote: >> Please tell ur laughing friends that GUI, *point and click*, is for people >> who can't type. > > If you really believe that, then I would like to hear your reaction after > giving up your 3270 emulator and doing all your work from a 2714. > > > Mark Post
