BIt: From Chapter one: Data Processing and the IBM Mainframe

From Chapter one: Data Processing and the IBM Mainframe

This is the 4th excerpt from the second book in the Defen series: BIT: Business Information Technology: Foundations, Infrastructure, and Culture

Note that the section this is taken from, on the evolution of the data processing culture, includes numerous illustrations and information inserts omitted here.

Roots (part two: COBOL)

With Flowmatic, the program that read the script telling the computer in what order to assemble the pre-made binary modules to produce a runnable program included the ability to transfer data values between elements, thus producing a compilation consisting of both code and data and warranting its own renaming as a compiler instead of an assembler.

Further work on Flowmatic formed the experimental basis for a 1952 paper by Dr. Hopper on compiler theory that heavily influenced a team, led by John Backus, at IBM’s Watson Scientific Laboratory, that worked between 1954 and 1957 to develop FORTRAN (Formula translation) for use in scientific work.

Subsequent progress in the development and use of Flowmatic fell somewhat off the mainstream of computing research in the period largely because most of the hardware and software research was focused on numerical processing rather than automatic data processing. Thus most of the software research focused on languages like Fortran and most of the hardware research focused on developing and managing larger memory sub-systems and faster floating point processors.

When Remington Rand bought the Flowmatic project with its acquisition of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, its executives inherited the UNIVAC line and with it a focus on dealing with naval logistics and related problems. As a result, Rand funded additional research on compilers and the problems associated with storing and manipulating characters, rather than numbers.

By 1957, the year in which IBM released the first disk drive, Flowmatic had developed to the point of commercial release, causing an immediate demand for its standardization among other commercial computer manufacturers eager to take advantage of the new tool. Because Flowmatic’s development at Unisys had been funded as an unclassified project by the U.S. Navy it was theoretically in the public domain and various companies, including IBM, used this as part of their basis for laying claim to it.

That pressure resulted in a 1959 Conference on Data System Languages (CODASYL) at which IBM representative Bob Bemer and others succeeded in having the consensus version of Flowmatic made widely available and renamed Common Business Oriented Language, or COBOL.

As a programming language COBOL inherited all of its key characteristics from Flowmatic and the card deck management problem it addressed. Thus COBOL’s designation as the primary language for commercial data processing directly perpetuated those ideas and later heavily influenced how people saw and managed commercial system design. This effect transcended both hardware and software since people thought in terms of COBOL and built both hardware and applications accordingly.

Since Flowmatic’s fundamental design reflected the problem its designers were dealing with - handling naval logistics with the mechanical tabulators available to them- it focused on automating program flow in a step-wise process built around first sorting, and then tabulating, punch cards.

Thus the fundamental operations in COBOL are to attach a file or device, read from the file or device into memory, do something with the data now in memory, and write out the result.

Notice the co-evolution here: the assumptions made about programming in COBOL came from the 1940s Flowmatic effort to automate 1920s card batch management, and the structure of the resulting language then influenced generations of hardware and software designers and managers.

Among other effects, this meant that COBOL programs would tend to be much more I/O than CPU limited and implicitly created a need for temporary, “near memory,” storage for data being held pending completion of an I/O operation - thus defining the architecture for today’s most expensive mainframes.

COBOL was first codified in 1959; five years later, in 1964, IBM released the matching System 360 computer family and completely revolutionized the systems industry. Thus the 360 reflected in hardware the fundamental COBOL operations which, themselves, derived from the card sorting requirements of pre-digital data processing. Even then IBM was still hedging its bet on commercial data processing so the 360 was designed to be an “all round” processor which could be configured to excel at either scientific or commercial processing depending on customer needs, while maintaining backward instruction set compatibility with two previous, and mutually incompatible, IBM computer products:

The key lesson to learn about COBOL? Long, boring, strings of tabulating machine setup and operations.

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Some notes:

1. These excerpts don’t include footnotes and most illustrations have been dropped as simply too hard to insert correctly. (The wordpress html “editor” as used here enables a limited html subset and is implemented to force frustrations like the CPM line delimiters from MS-DOS).
2. The feedback I’m looking for is what you guys do best: call me on mistakes, add thoughts/corrections on stuff I’ve missed or gotten wrong, and generally help make the thing better.

   Notice that getting the facts right is particularly important for BIT - and that the length of the thing plus the complexity of the terminology and ideas introduced suggest that any explanatory anecdotes anyone may want to contribute could be valuable.

3. When I make changes suggested in the comments, I make those changes only in the original, not in the excerpts reproduced here.