CICS Month Trivia

CICS Month Trivia

It’s CICS month at Planet Mainframe! That means we’ll spend some time this month exploring the system that’s been the bedrock of enterprise transaction processing since the 1960s. CICS grew out of the idea of Ben Riggens, an IBM systems engineer working at Virginia...

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Exploring the Virtual CICS User Group Session

Exploring the Virtual CICS User Group Session

Our first Virtual CICS User Group session of 2025 was an exciting deep dive into CICS modernization and automation, featuring IBM experts Drew Hughes and Andrew Twydell. With Broadcom and DataKinetics as sponsors, Ansible Automation Platform in action, provisioning...

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The Many Charms of COBOL

The Many Charms of COBOL

 During my studies in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), also known as East Germany, I immersed myself in the world of programming languages. My first companions on this journey were PL/1 and the ubiquitous assembler ASM370. Why these two? Well, the...

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CICS Programming Best Practices

CICS Programming Best Practices

ASRA Abend Code In discussing aspects of CICS Command level Programming, have you ever wondered why a Program Interrupt (S0C4, S0C7) results in an ASRA Abend code? Firstly, it is important to remember that the middle 2 characters of every Abend code tells us who...

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