For the past 31 years, the pastoral environment of Hursley Park, Winchester, has provided a home for IBM UK Laboratories, and since 1974, the laboratories have also had responsibility for all research and development of IBM’s Customer Information Control System, CICS. It was originally conceived back in 1964 by Ben Riggins, the so-called father of CICS, and first shipped in July 1969. To celebrate CICS’ 20th birthday, IBM has been indulging in fairly lavish, if non-alcoholic festivities, and California-based Riggins flew over to Hursley and participated in his inimitable paternal fashion. Kidnapping As befits a father, Mr Riggins set the tone of the birthday events and treated guests to a potted history of CICS, from its conception, until the Hursley kidnapping some 15 years ago. He was closely followed by Marcia Gillespie, CICS products manager, who gave an account of CICS’ teenage years, otherwise known as The Hursley Era. Next on the birthday agenda was Julian Jones, the man responsible for CICS/ESA Version 3, and to close the proceedings, Geoff Robinson, director of the laboratory, did a bit of adroit, if somewhat vague crystal ball gazing into the future of transaction processing. Riggins believes that nothing speaks louder in IBM than revenue, and it is this that justifies past and future investment in CICS. It was originally forecast that demand for the software would amount to 50 just licences, but CICS is currently used by 489 of IBM’s top 500 customers, a sum total of 30,000 licences worldwide. Ms Gillespie developed this theme and declared that in 1974 Hursley employed 162 people to work directly on CICS development, and that number has now reached 410. As well as people power, Hursley now dedicates three 9370s, a 4341, a 4361, six 4381s, a 3081, a 3084, and a 3090-600 to CICS performance and testing. Ms Gillespie went on to describe the CICS family, originally developed to interface with the OS operating system of the System/360, but now working under DOS, VM, MVS, OS/2 and MVS/ESA. CICS/DOS/VS is aimed largely at small to medium sized companies and is available either as a separate product or as part of the VSE/SP package. The VM version is designed for the workstation user who will have one central or main site and various satellite locations. It also comes as a stand-alone or as part of a VM/IS package. Unlike the VS version, CICS/VM enabels CICS and non-CICS applications to share the same environment, and a single CMS application can contain programming statements from more than one products interface. Nonetheless, CICS/VM is unable to match the performance of CICS/VS. The former is designed to operate in a distributed environment in which transaction processing is just one function, and the processing workload is significantly less than that of the VS system. Functions not provided by CICS/VM without additional support include multi-region operating, user journalling, batch data exchange, transaction routing, and some function shipping. CICS/MVS is designed specifically for the MVS/XA user and replaces CICS/OS/VS Version 1, which IBM is withdrawing from the market as from September. CICS/MVS is designed as a platform for CICS/ESA and they share a number of faclities including extended recovery facilities and data tables. The data tables provide VSAM users with an in memory file system for keyed access, and the extended recovery facilities have active and alternate systems to cope with normal and heavy workloads. In contrast to CICS/VM, MVS provides multiregion operation, inter-system communication and resource definition on-line. And the new CICS OS/2 provides a subset of the CICS application programming interface and mainframe CICS Cobol command level applications can be migrated to run under CICS OS/2 at the workstation level. It supports a number of features including CICS VSAM file control; interval control; temporary storage and transient data; 3270 terminal control, and basic mapping support. The latest addition to the CICS family, CICS/ESA Version 3 Release 1, was the responsibilty of Julian Jones
, CICS/ESA development manager. He informed us that it offers greater capacity for growth, more reliability and availability, and better manageability than its predecessors. Version 3 has a new software engineered internal structure, and is written in Z language, jointly developed with the Programming Research Laboratory at Oxford University. It features a number of enhancements including support for the database control facility of IMS/ESA Database Manager Version 3, which enables users to separate the database and its management into its own MVS/ESA address space. Version 3 also gives access to Data Entry Databases, and as with MVS, incorporates CICS Data Table functions to enable faster access to frequently-used information. In addition, it will support transaction routing from Advanced Program to Program Communication devices, such as the AS/400 and PS/2 workstations. And Version 3 also provides a new storage manager and improved Extended Recovery Facility. Middle age Jones re-emphasised Gillespie’s claim that CICS/MVS Version 2 is the platform for migration to and co-existence with Version 3, and future enhancements will include expansion of the Systems Application Architecture platform and national language support. To draw the day to a close, Geoff Robinson looked into the future of transaction processing. His message was that new communications facilities, especially optical fibre communications, would usher in an era of worldwide transaction processing systems, and the days of the homogeneous system are already numbered. Nonetheless, developments in communications will mean that data integrity is threatened, and security will have to be improved, and Esprit projects are currently examining that problem. As regards the specific future of CICS, all the IBMers agreed on one thing. It has survived the trials of infancy, childhood, and adolescence. ESA now means that it’s all set for the next 20 years, and the on-set of middle age.
