Installing a new Tandem mainframe for performance reasons required changing all TAL procedure calls in COBOL85 applications, which was projected to take three years by the development group. Needed to find a way to change 5,000 programs without freezing the code for more than a month.
Vendor had to change the operating system calls to allow for high-pin processes. Ability to run more than 256 programs in one CPU had become very important because resources were unavailable during batch processing. This was easy for the vendor but painful for software development companies that had to react to regulatory changes mandated by the SEC and NASD for brokerage processing.
Directed systems department to build an intercept library that sat between the developers’ code and the operating system that invoked the necessary OS parameters to utilize high-pin processing. The library was implemented in three months, which allow the COBOL programmers to leverage this technology without having to change one line of code. Library was simple-bound to the program after compilation and released to production after QA testing.
Saving three years’ development time of 60+ programmers salvaged millions of dollars for the company, and the ability to migrate to new CPUs increased processing power and reduced monthly run-rate expense.
