ON 1 in COBOL

[Arnold Trembley]

Lately there have been no usenet postings in any of the groups I follow,
which makes me wonder if my provider is having a problem, or if my
account has expired.

For anyone who worked with IBM OS/VS COBOL, you might have encountered a
first-time switch in the procedure division via the "ON 1" statement.

There are a couple of interesting discussion threads in the GnuCOBOL
forums mentioning "ON 1". I even contributed by locating an online
OS/VS COBOL manual with the full syntax for the ON verb.

Enjoy.


Where did the ON verb dissappear to?
https://sourceforge.net/p/gnucobol/discussion/lounge/thread/eeb7391cca/


Converting OSVS-MF Cobo programsl to GnuCOBOL 2.2 (AIX 7)
https://sourceforge.net/p/gnucobol/discussion/help/thread/9a15394cc9/



--
https://www.arnoldtrembley.com/

[Clark F Morris]

On Wed, 10 Nov 2021 19:06:41 -0600, Arnold Trembley
<arnold....@att.net> wrote:

>Lately there have been no usenet postings in any of the groups I follow,
>which makes me wonder if my provider is having a problem, or if my
>account has expired.

Your provider, like mine - Forte-Agent may not have implemented TLS
1.2 security protocol (encryption as I recall) and in my case that
means I lost the feed from ibm-main so I had to change from no-mail to
mail to keep up with it. I don't understand the details but it has to
do with receiving messages from newsgroups (I also don't know how
Usenet works). I am going to look for another provider and am open to
suggestion for ones based in either the United States or Canada.

Clark Morris

[pete dashwood]

Hi Arnold,

I remember using external switches in COBOL on an ICL 1901A and an IBM
360-30 back in the 1960s...

typically... (COBOL)

IF SWITCH-1
READY TRACE.

If anything hung or crashed, the SOP was for the Operator to set switch
1 and re-run it. There were 24 switches taking one "word" of storage.

typically ... (Operator CLI - later, GEORGE)

ON 1
EXEC <whatever>

On the IBM 360s these switches were held in a byte in the Communication
area of the 8KB OS... (Yes, really... we had 32KB of total memory... and
ran the business (invoicing, stock control, reporting, etc.) in that.

I seem to remember using dials and buttons to set them.

You dialed up the address of the switch byte and then selected the bit
you wanted, which lit up on the console display lights. To set it, you
pressed: System reset, ROAR Reset, and Start. Then checked it was lit.

There were 8 switches available.

Happy Days!

Pete.

--
I used to write *COBOL*; now I can do *anything*...

[Joe]

UPSI switches I believe?

[pete dashwood]

Thanks Joe, that is exactly what they were. I had forgotten... User
Program Switch Indicators if memory serves me correctly.