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Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

A tax agency unified all its data from different agencies via X.25 and satellite connections. However, the process was expensive and slower than expected because the files were uncompressed and stored as basic plain-text ASCII/EBCDIC files.

One obvious solution to this problem was to buy an Ethernet network device for the mainframe (which used Token Ring), but that was yet another very expensive IBM product. With that device, we could have simply compressed and uncompressed the files on any standard PC before transferring them to/from the mainframe.

Another obvious solution was to use C to compile a basic compression and decompression tool. However, C wasn’t available—buying it would have been expensive as well!

So, we developed the compression utility twice (for performance comparisons), using COBOL and REXX. These turned out to be two amusing projects, as we had to handle bits in COBOL, a language never intended for this purpose.

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The capture of all thought by IBM at these palaces was nuts.

Circa 2002 I’m a Unix admin at a government agency. Unix is a nascent platform previously only used for terminal services. Mostly AIX and HPUX, with some Digital stuff as well. I created a ruckus when I installed OpenSSH on a server (Telnet was standard). The IBM CE/spy ratted me out to the division director, who summoned me for an ass chewing.

He turned out to be a good guy and listened to and ultimately agreed with my concerns. (He was surprised, as mainframe Telnet has encryption) Except one. “Son, we don’t use freeware around here. We’ll buy an SSH solution for your team. Sit tight.”

I figured they’d buy the SSH Communications software. Turned out we got IBMSSH, for the low price of $950/cpu for a shared source license.

I go about getting the bits and install the software… and the CLI is very familiar. I grab the source tarball and it turns out this product I never heard of was developed by substituting the word “Open” with “IBM”. To the point that the man page had a sentence that read “IBM a connection”.

> C wasn’t available—buying it would have been expensive as well!

On the subject of expensive mainframe software, I got to do the spit take once of "you are paying how much for a lousy ftp client? per month!" I think it was around $500 per month.

Man open source software really has us spoiled.

The youngs have no idea. You used to have to pay for development tools. In high school, I would hand-assemble my 6502 assembler programs by writing them out longhand on graph paper, fill in the hex in the left columns than type in the hex in the Apple monitor to get the program running. Heaven forbid there was anything wrong with the code, the hand-assembling or the keyboarding, but I couldn’t afford one of the paid assemblers (in retrospect, I should have written one in AppleSoft, but hindsight is 20/20, and I don’t know that I was smart enough then to write an assembler anyway). Spending $500–1000 for a compiler in the 90s was typical. Now the kids whine about paying the relatively cheap fee for things like JetBrain IDEs.

Back about roughly 1978 to 1982, I wrote and sold a 6800/6809 disassembler ("Dynamite Disassembler") for I think $200 a copy. Sold enough copies to pay for computer equipment during my college days. I think we reduced the price to $100 or maybe $150 when the TRS-80 Color Computer came out with a 6809 powering it.

$200 back in 1980 is about $800 today. Amazing to think anyone would spend that much for a fairly simple tool.

Turbo Pascal was revolutionizing when they retailed it at USD 49.99 [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal

Diskettes inside the book as I recall.

We were running Oregon Pascal on a PDP/11-44 (later upgraded to a VAX 11/780) that cost thousands. To have access to Pascal for $49 was too good to be true. Kept thinking it had to be deficient somehow, but it wasn't.

The paradigm shift was underway right in front of us.

My CS 101 class in 1989 was all in Pascal and had to be entered via a IBM terminal and ran as a batch job on our school mainframe. There was no interactive feedback and you had to hike across campus to a basement of a building that had an enormous chain printer to get your greenbar paper output of your run to see if it 1) compiled and 2) output the right thing that the autoscorer checked when you flagged your assignment as complete.

I was lucky in that I had a Tandy 1000SX in my dorm room and I had Turbo Pascal (bought using an educational discount at the school bookstore). A hidden feature of Turbo Pascal was that it supported multiple comment delimiters, including the comment delimiters used by IBM Pascal (the assignments were also graded on comment quality). I was able to do all my class work locally, using interactive debugging, and thanks to a guy I met while working at a local computer shop that was the student IBM rep I got a file uploader and the phone number of hidden 2400 baud that it used so I could directly upload my code and then dial into the interactive terminal number and submit it.

I sort of felt bad for all the other kids in the class for the write/submit/walk/debug loop they endured, but not really.

I think I paid $299 (one time fee) for a license for PKZIP in 1993 for a product I was building. Open source is pretty amazing.

> Another obvious solution was to use C to compile a basic compression and decompression tool. However, C wasn’t available—buying it would have been expensive as well!

I would have thought in the (IBM) mainframe world, PL/I (or PL/S) would have been the obvious choice.

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