1981 and 1984 were "breather years" for CICS Development. During the other years (1977-1985) CICS Development was a busy place, designing, developing and shipping a series of major new releases. 1986 turned out to be another less demanding year for CICS Development. Yes, CICS/DOS/VS 1.7 was announced for availability in July 1987 but in a sense this was not much more than an adaptation of CICS/OS/VS 1.7. Granted, CICS/DOS/VS 1.7 had some new things, unique to the DOS environment, but the "big hitters" common with the CICS/OS/VS product were RDO for terminals, file control enhancements and so on.
During 1985 IBM announced CICSPARS as a Program Product replacing its prior Field Developed Program (FDP) packaging and the highly popular Performance Analyzer II FDP. CICS/VS had developed and shipped the CICS Monitoring Facility (CMF) which outputted various performance, statistical and accounting data. CICSPARS was designed to process that data both in the online and batch environments.
Performance monitoring was a very high interest, highly competitive market with Omegamon and TMON being vendor offerings which were widely used by CICS customers. CICSPARS may have been a case of too little, too late, because after a few years of attempting to be competitive, CICSPARS would be withdrawn.
CICSPARS was announced in November 1985 and shipped in March 1986. The product included alert monitoring for the online environment and batch reporting for offline analysis of CMF data. The online component had a variety of real time displays for storage usage, performance data and graphical displays (e..g pie charts, etc). The batch reporting component provided performance analysis, storage reports and exception data.
The intent of CICSPARS was to assist the user with assessing processor utilization, response time, transaction rates, storage utilization and message count/message size information.
Another software introduction which attempted to broaden CICS' market was the announcement of CICS/DDM (Distributed Data Manager) which would enable S/36 and S/38 computers to access CICS VSAM data as a remote resource. DDM was introduced as a separately orderable, separately priced product, but later it would be packaged with the CICS Transaction Server product.
The CICS/CMS (Conversational Monitoring System) product, announced in October 1985 was made available in June 1986. Although interesting, the net of it was that the product, with its follow-on evolution as the CICS/VM product, never achieved much penetration of the VM marketplace. At best the CICS CMS/VM effort may have sold 200 licenses in its short lifetime. Not enough to sustain itself with a profitable business case and forecast. There were no technical or performance issues with the product(s). CICS users with access to VM systems simply did not demonstrate an interest in comprehensive transaction processing.
The Screen Definition Facility (SDF) had a flurry of announcements in 1986. SDF was an aid to assist CICS users with the generation and maintenance of Basic Mapping Support (BMS) maps. SDF contained editing, librarian, print, upload and other utilitarian functions. The original SDF evolved into SDF II. Some users liked the product's function yet others were apparently not interested and continued to develop their maps using CICS-provided BMS assembler macros.
VS COBOL II was also announced in 1985 and delivered in December 1986. In addition to language enhancements that were well received, there were two aspects of interest to the CICS community. First, it was no longer necessary for CICS to modify the runtime environment in order to make COBOL usable in the multi-programmed, concurrent transaction environment. Secondly, since VS COBOL II was a major, new COBOL compiler and not simply an enhancement to the previous OS/VS COBOL compiler, IBM offered a CICS COBOL Conversion Aid (CCCA) to assist customers with migration the compiler aspect of applications and also to assist with the conversion of CICS macro level usage to CICS command level usage.
Lastly, there was the announcement for CICS/DOS/VS 1.7, complementing the CICS/OS/VS 1.7 which was already available. Much of the CICS/DOS/VS 1.7 product was similar to the enhancements made to the CICS/OS/VS product. Unique to DOS was CICS' introduction of the Report Controller which provided JES-like spooling capabilities for the DOS user. CICS/DOS/VS 1.7 would be packaged with greater integration with the DOS operating system, VSE/SP 3.1.
The functions similar to both the DOS and OS CICS products included RDO for terminals, autoinstall, improved restart, VSAM verify, deferred open, dynamic open/close, multiple LSR pools, multiple strings and buffers for transient data and temporary storage, transaction routing via ISC, maximum class specifications (CMXT), new DOS wait logic, new EXEC CICS command and parameters (e.g. RESP, RESP2, SUSPEND), etc, etc, etc.
CICS was no "couch potato" just sitting there watching the world go by. Many things were happening in 1986 which contributed to the evolution of the product and its related products.
Copyright © 2004 - Yelavich Consulting, Sparks, NV
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