any known easter eggs in mainframe?

boyti ko · New User Joined: 03 Nov 2014 Posts: 78 Location: Malaysia

just asking

Bill Woodger · Posted: Thu Jan 29, 2015 3:43 pm

No. Food is strictly forbidden in the machine room.

David Robinson · Active User Joined: 21 Dec 2011 Posts: 199 Location: UK

enrico-sorichetti · Posted: Thu Jan 29, 2015 7:06 pm

/soapbox on

once upon a time i had a customer
where the operators were continuously eating and drinking wine
( fortunately as far as work flow they were really smart ones )

apart users complaining about reports with stains from the banquets

the worse victim was the IBM CE who at least once every two weeks
was called to clean up the card reader jams because of bread crumbs

/soapbox off

prino · Posted: Thu Jan 29, 2015 8:43 pm

Actually, the Enterprise PL/I compiler load module contains, in the string of PL/I keywords, the "keyword" "ELDERON", the surname of IBM's lead PL/I developer. How to use this keyword is another matter.

And the back-end of the same compiler also contains text that hints at lots of interesting (diagnostic?) output...

Ed Goodman · Active Member Joined: 08 Jun 2011 Posts: 556 Location: USA

More on inside joke, but the main module for SMS dasd management is huge, and it's name is something like Godzilla. (something like 'GDZLLA')

vasanthz · Posted: Mon Feb 02, 2015 10:39 pm

Dont know if this would qualify as an easter egg.

ISPF does not allow us to create PDS member names with underscore & other special characters.

But if we use a IEBCOPY along with rename to a name having underscore, it works fine & the member in ISPF shows underscore in its name.

prino · Posted: Mon Feb 02, 2015 10:44 pm

vasanthz · Posted: Mon Feb 02, 2015 11:14 pm

True.. Also seen Changeman creating funky member names.
Its that ISPF only plays coy & does not allow creation of cool member names.

Bill Woodger · Posted: Tue Feb 03, 2015 12:05 am

Poke this through the COBOL compiler:

steve-myers · Posted: Tue Feb 03, 2015 1:03 am

SMP (not SMPE) created members with all sorts of weird member names.

I was thinking ISPF is enforcing JCL restrictions on member names, but a quick review of JCL reference did not disclose anything about a restriction there, though I expect there are restrictions.

The Creating Nonstandard PDS Member Names chapter in "DFSMS Using Data Sets" discusses funny member names in more detail. It does mention JCL restrictions, though it does not go into detail. It does refer to a chapter in "JCL Reference" that I have not looked at. It also talks about the actual restrictions, both for direct users (the users who use STOW, or BLDL/FIND) and users that alter the JFCB to pretend a member name was specified in JCL. I see no point in discussing this here. That's what my research turned up.

don.leahy · Posted: Wed Feb 04, 2015 9:01 pm

Here is a weird member name which shows some surprising ISPF behaviour:

Bobinator · New User Joined: 12 Sep 2023 Posts: 1 Location: USA

Back in the 80's, I had a boss that forced me to review complete Dumps to resolve the reason for a floating-point exception. Later I started using Abend-Aid.
In any case, in reviewing the dumps (which included the entire computer's memory), it was also interesting to find "wolfgangamadeusmozart" in the OS portion of the memory dump. This always tickled by boss every time I showed it to him.

Pedro · Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2023 3:41 am

Not sure if this qualifies as an Easter Egg, but some of the examples in IMS manuals mention the names of my kids.