Soldier of FORTRAN :ReBoot: on Nostr: Time for a tale about a grifter: Over on bird site, right at the height of the ...
Time for a tale about a grifter:
Over on bird site, right at the height of the pandemic a bunch of Unemployment systems buckled under the load. The culprit? COBOL..... okay actually it was shitty Java apps that sat in front of the mainframes that were running COBOL. But COBOL was blamed nonetheless.
A grifter who shall remain nameless made a tweet about running an entire banks COBOL application on MVS 3.8J on a Raspberry Pi. The post went viral cause it hit on all the right buzzwords of the time. This immediately set off my bullshit alarms because the COBOL we have available doesn't even support END-IF statements. There's just no fucking way on earth they were doing as they claimed. The funniest part was they posted screenshots as if they were running it, but they were screenshots from the manual!
Anyway, so I called them out, they tried to weasel out of it but I kept pressing them. So they finally posted an actual screenshot... of the hercules terminal. You should know, when you download and install TK4- there's two scripts: 'mvs' and 'start'. The one you want to run is mvs.sh, start.sh just starts hercules but doesn't actually IPL the mainframe. Any guesses which command they ran in their screeshot? If you guessed start.sh and the screenshot was just a hercules console waiting for input youd be correct! (hercules is just the emulator, it would be like claiming to play FFX on PCSX2 on a raspberry pi, but its a screenshot of the emulator UI with no games).
So I made fun of them for this and pointed out they ran the wrong command, they needed to run mvs.sh. They deleted the tweet, then reposted it with the new screenshot showing the system after IPL (LMAO!).
Anyway, calling our their grift made them VERY upset. Through back channels I find out that they've called IBM to try and get me in trouble (lol), when that didn't work they threatened to send journalists after me (nice guy).
The best part was that when that went nowhere they told IBM that they had been working on a blockchain app for mainframes but since the mainframe community hurt their feelings they were going to delete their code and not share it! Boo hoo.
Upon hearing that obvious bullshit I took it upon myself to build what they claimed, I wanted to make an interface to manage my Dogecoin in COBOL and CICS.
Thus was born DOGECICS https://github.com/mainframed/DOGECICS the coolest way to manage and send dogecoin on earth.
Not only that, but I was able to run the whole thing on my Raspberry Pi Zero W
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWRy6e6xDyY
Better yet, when I tweeted out about Dogecics it was picked up by Adafruit!
And thats the story about how I upset a grifter and wrote a CICS application. If you want to try DOGECICS all you need to do is download TK4- https://wotho.ethz.ch/tk4-/ and follow the instructions in the github link.
Over on bird site, right at the height of the pandemic a bunch of Unemployment systems buckled under the load. The culprit? COBOL..... okay actually it was shitty Java apps that sat in front of the mainframes that were running COBOL. But COBOL was blamed nonetheless.
A grifter who shall remain nameless made a tweet about running an entire banks COBOL application on MVS 3.8J on a Raspberry Pi. The post went viral cause it hit on all the right buzzwords of the time. This immediately set off my bullshit alarms because the COBOL we have available doesn't even support END-IF statements. There's just no fucking way on earth they were doing as they claimed. The funniest part was they posted screenshots as if they were running it, but they were screenshots from the manual!
Anyway, so I called them out, they tried to weasel out of it but I kept pressing them. So they finally posted an actual screenshot... of the hercules terminal. You should know, when you download and install TK4- there's two scripts: 'mvs' and 'start'. The one you want to run is mvs.sh, start.sh just starts hercules but doesn't actually IPL the mainframe. Any guesses which command they ran in their screeshot? If you guessed start.sh and the screenshot was just a hercules console waiting for input youd be correct! (hercules is just the emulator, it would be like claiming to play FFX on PCSX2 on a raspberry pi, but its a screenshot of the emulator UI with no games).
So I made fun of them for this and pointed out they ran the wrong command, they needed to run mvs.sh. They deleted the tweet, then reposted it with the new screenshot showing the system after IPL (LMAO!).
Anyway, calling our their grift made them VERY upset. Through back channels I find out that they've called IBM to try and get me in trouble (lol), when that didn't work they threatened to send journalists after me (nice guy).
The best part was that when that went nowhere they told IBM that they had been working on a blockchain app for mainframes but since the mainframe community hurt their feelings they were going to delete their code and not share it! Boo hoo.
Upon hearing that obvious bullshit I took it upon myself to build what they claimed, I wanted to make an interface to manage my Dogecoin in COBOL and CICS.
Thus was born DOGECICS https://github.com/mainframed/DOGECICS the coolest way to manage and send dogecoin on earth.
Not only that, but I was able to run the whole thing on my Raspberry Pi Zero W
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWRy6e6xDyY
Better yet, when I tweeted out about Dogecics it was picked up by Adafruit!
And thats the story about how I upset a grifter and wrote a CICS application. If you want to try DOGECICS all you need to do is download TK4- https://wotho.ethz.ch/tk4-/ and follow the instructions in the github link.