did anyone ever program in RPG?

[jebem]

(07-02-2015 06:03 PM)Don Shepherd Wrote:  (...) three programming languages for the IBM 360: BAL (assembler), COBOL, and RPG (Report Program Generator).

During those days I never had to touch an IBM mainframe directly, but I have worked closely with people working on them, when we had to integrate our WANG computers with the IBM systems. Wang VS series did support RPG II despite I really never had to develop on it as we had our own native languages including a scripting Procedure Language.

I worked about 20 years for WANG Laboratories starting in 1981. The WANG VS series computer systems, based on the IBM 360/70 instruction set, had a full set of networking sub-systems to guarantee interoperability with IBM systems at the time.

Our WANG systems could communicate with IBM mainframes to do file transfer by emulating the IBM RJE 2780/3780 protocol.
WANG did implemented the IBM SNA architecture as well at the 3270 Control Unit level to let the WANG systems behave like IBM 3278 Terminals.

Wang VS computer series used an interpreted scripting language called VS Procedure Language (VS/PL), in addition to the other compiled languages (Assembly, BASIC, COBOL74, C, PL/I, FORTRAN4 and RPG II) and 4th generation application development languages (PACE).

Dr. An Wang was the founder of WANG Laboratories and a brilliant inventor, holding a significant number of patents at the time, related to memory (magnetic and later developed the SIMM), calculators (specially for scientific markets), data communications, touch pad and printer technologies, among others. He did work closely with/for/against IBM as well.

In many ways, WANG laboratories were ahead of its time, when they integrated text, voice and image in their terminals and office automation applications during the mid 80's.
Wang FreeStyle was another futuristic product in 1990, when WANG released the first touch pad device to the market, integrated with all Wang others solutions.
I guess the world was not ready for that kind of technology. We had to wait 20 years to see Wang ideas come to mass market.

I was visiting Brussels at the Wang headquarters (close to NATO facilities) in the late 80's when we noticed the Wang flag was half mast, and then we heard about Dr. An Wang death.
It was a sad day, and after that Wang laboratories business went downhill and not even Chapter 11 could save it.