Hello gentle men.

?

I'm new to this group. I have however I have been poking around with DOS/VS rel 34 on Hercules for about 6 months now and it works like a charm. This is quite a tour down memory lane for me. This year, i.e. 40 years ago I started my career as developer coding in PL/1 on what have must been OS/VS2 with CICS, I received some very thorough CICS education, learning both CICS macro-level and CICS command-level coding. In 1983 I got my first job as system programmer in a brand new VM/VSE/CICS installation.

I have been skimming through the Yahoo archives and it seems that CICS is in great demand among the members in this group and I completely agree. However, I have not been able to see anyone being successful in this area.

Now for my question. Has anyone had success obtaining a working version of CICS - no matter which version - and are willing to share? I understand that even old versions of CICS were licensed in contrast to the OS itself, and I fear that my question is opening Pandoras box :-) Of course I don't want to break any licensing rules for this.

Br,
Steen

#69

Hi Steen and welcome to the group. ?I’m encouraged by your request and would second your motion for CICS. I’ve been dabbling with COBOL, Assembler, and RPG code and I too have experience with macro and command level CICS. I hope you receive good responses on this as I am interested also.?

Jim Snellen

#70

The problem is, CICS/OS and CICS/DOS, and CICS/OS/VS and CICS/DOS/VS, were always "pay for" licensed program products.? So, even if someone could find an old enough copy of CICS/DOS or CICS/DOS/VS that could run on the public domain DOS/VS Rel. 34 system, it would not be legal to do so.

However, all is not "lost" -- there is the KIKS "clone" of CICS that currently runs under MVS/TSO and VM/CMS.? It would take some effort, but someone could port that code to run under DOS/VS, to create a "clone" of CICS for DOS.?? Note that I am not suggesting that such a project would be trivial, by any means.?? The KIKS clone currently relies on VM/CMS or MVS/TSO to provide the support for multiple users and terminals.?? Someone would need to write code to handle that, much as the original CICS did.?? There are other examples of public domain code that shows how to create a multi-user teleprocessing environment, e.g. using BTAM or TCAM, such as the "BEST" system from Baylor that was a kind of "TSO clone" back in the day and ran under OS/360, even before TSO became available.? You can find some of this software on some of the old SHARE SPLA Tapes that are available from CBTTape.org.

I hope that helps.

#71

Seeing this thread reminded me of the project I undertook to convert our DOS/VS Holiday Reservation system, written in Cobol for CICS, over to Altergo's Shadow II? system.?

Wonder what happened to that?

Steve

Show quoted text

On Thu, 21 Jan 2021 at 16:29, Mark Waterbury <mark.s.waterbury@...> wrote:

The problem is, CICS/OS and CICS/DOS, and CICS/OS/VS and CICS/DOS/VS, were always "pay for" licensed program products.? So, even if someone could find an old enough copy of CICS/DOS or CICS/DOS/VS that could run on the public domain DOS/VS Rel. 34 system, it would not be legal to do so.

However, all is not "lost" -- there is the KIKS "clone" of CICS that currently runs under MVS/TSO and VM/CMS.? It would take some effort, but someone could port that code to run under DOS/VS, to create a "clone" of CICS for DOS.?? Note that I am not suggesting that such a project would be trivial, by any means.?? The KIKS clone currently relies on VM/CMS or MVS/TSO to provide the support for multiple users and terminals.?? Someone would need to write code to handle that, much as the original CICS did.?? There are other examples of public domain code that shows how to create a multi-user teleprocessing environment, e.g. using BTAM or TCAM, such as the "BEST" system from Baylor that was a kind of "TSO clone" back in the day and ran under OS/360, even before TSO became available.? You can find some of this software on some of the old SHARE SPLA Tapes that are available from CBTTape.org.

I hope that helps.

#72

There were a number of CICS "clones" or "TP monitors" back in the day.? WESTI, TaskMaster, one from GE? (IIRC, cannot recall the name right now ...), among others.

It would be great if someone could find a copy of any of those, but I think they all disappeared as those companies got out of that business, since CICS gradually came to dominate the market for "on-line transaction processing" so chances of finding any of that stuff remains slim.

There was one that was made available (open source or public domain) "FTPM" that ran under the Siemens BS2000 MVS "clone" OS, IIRC, that was made available on one of the old Hercules mailing lists, but it was all written in German, so that made it more difficult for anyone wanting to try to "port" it from BS2000 to the real MVS 3.8J or DOS/VS, etc.

There are also some early TSO-like terminal monitors that ran under OS/360, such as BEST from Baylor U., that can be found on some of the old SHARE SPLA tapes available via CBTTape.org ...? Perhaps someone could adapt some of them to run under DOS/VS, as part of an effort to re-create some CICS "clone" on DOS/VS?

And there is a modern CICS "clone" called KIKS that runs under VM/CMS or MVS/TSO, but it relies on VM or TSO doing all the multi-user multi-tasking stuff, hence why I mentioned BEST and similar programs above.

Hope that helps,

Mark

#73

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the clarification, this was more or less what I expected was the case.

I have also had a look at KICKS which look quite interesting and porting this to DOS/VS could be an interesting challenge that I might take up. Hopefully it's written in assembler which happen to be my favourite programming language. I will also take a look a your suggestions liek "BEST".

BR,

Steen

#74

开云体育

Before there was CICS on DOS/VS there was CICS/Entry, a much scaled down version of CICS on MVS.

And before that there was FASTER, from the ?.? It only supported 2260 terminal.? Writing a transaction involved using many, many macros.

I wrote a macro for CICS/ENTRY that mimicked the FASTER macros so that we could use FASTER code in CICS/ENTRY with very few modifications.

I believe FASTER was originally written for electric utility companies.

?

/Fran Hensler at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania USA for 52 years??????

mailto:RockFox@...?? ?

?????????????????"Yes, Virginia, there is a Slippery Rock"

?

Show quoted text

From: [email protected] <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Mark Waterbury
Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2021 12:31 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [H390-DOSVS] DOS/VS and CICS?

?

There were a number of CICS "clones" or "TP monitors" back in the day.? WESTI, TaskMaster, one from GE? (IIRC, cannot recall the name right now ...), among others.

It would be great if someone could find a copy of any of those, but I think they all disappeared as those companies got out of that business, since CICS gradually came to dominate the market for "on-line transaction processing" so chances of finding any of that stuff remains slim.

There was one that was made available (open source or public domain) "FTPM" that ran under the Siemens BS2000 MVS "clone" OS, IIRC, that was made available on one of the old Hercules mailing lists, but it was all written in German, so that made it more difficult for anyone wanting to try to "port" it from BS2000 to the real MVS 3.8J or DOS/VS, etc.

There are also some early TSO-like terminal monitors that ran under OS/360, such as BEST from Baylor U., that can be found on some of the old SHARE SPLA tapes available via CBTTape.org ...? Perhaps someone could adapt some of them to run under DOS/VS, as part of an effort to re-create some CICS "clone" on DOS/VS?

And there is a modern CICS "clone" called KIKS that runs under VM/CMS or MVS/TSO, but it relies on VM or TSO doing all the multi-user multi-tasking stuff, hence why I mentioned BEST and similar programs above.

Hope that helps,

Mark

#75

Thanks for the explanation Mark. I guess it’s another “I wish IBM would release this to public domain”.?

I have used the KICKS program that’s included with VM/370 6PExt. It’s kinda neat but I’d rather use native DOS/VS CICS. ?Oh well. . .