You might be an old RPG programmer if...

Most RPG programmers have been programming RPG for a long time. Often a very long time. You might be an old RPG programmer if:

• You attended RPG programming classes at an IBM Guided Learning Center. Bonus points if you were studying to program on the S/34.
• You know what M1 and M2 mean in the context of backing up a midrange box with, wait for it, diskettes (!).
• You used, and even more appallingly, understood matching records.
• You wrote an interactive RPG program—using the RPG cycle.
• Carson Soule’s Revenge of the Indicators session at COMMON (circa 1986) rocked your world.
• You remember Shelly-Cashman RPG programming books.
• You thought that Earnie Malaga and Charlie Massoglia were RPG gods (they were). Godspeed, Ernie and Charlie. You were both great teachers and provided tons of help to thousands of us.

• You remember meeting IBMer Bob Harris at COMMON. Bonus points if you got a version of POP for the S/36 from him.
• You attended a BOF at COMMON. Bonus points if you ever led one!
• At a very early point in your RPG career, you thought this was the cleverest line of code ever:

C                   MOVEA     '1001'        *IN(10)

• You know what the COMMON acronym CUDS stood for (and no, it wasn’t COMMON User Discussion Session). Bonus points if a COMMON hotshot sneaked you into CUDS II.
• You were friends with with both your SE and CE. Bonus points if your SE ever bought you lunch.
• You subscribed to NEWS/34 (and follow-on publications) and Midrange Computing.
• As you branched out from RPG to other programming languages, you remember spending hours trying to figure out where date edit codes were in those other languages.
• You know what 14 7/8 x 11 green bar is.
• When you were coming up you asked an RPG mentor what you should do if your program needed more than 99 indicators.
• Your office ran an air conditioner in the winter because it had been wired for 220 and the midrange box sat in the corner emitting more BTUs than a diesel space heater.
• You attended Al Barsa’s “System Values: Everything You Always Wanted to Know” COMMON session more than once (because Al Barsa!).
• You tripped over a 5250 twinax cable. Repeatedly.
• You were so danged proud when you got your own 5250 Model 11 terminal. (I’d give about anything to able to use one of those keyboards with my PC today.)
• You struggled with memory management products like QEMM to have enough PC memory to use Client Access and other PC apps at the same time. Bonus points if you needed PC memory management for PC Support.
• You remember moving from the S/36 to the AS/400 and being very wary of externally described files and the black magic they represented.
• If your office used POM toilet paper, every time you saw a box of it you thought of the Program of the Month column in NEWS/36.

• You always had a well-worn RPG programming template (or, what I like to call, the RPG programmer’s pocket IDE) on your desk. Bonus points if you remember what was on the back.
• You thought that Paul Conte’s never-ending RPG article series in NEWS/400, “Ultimate Date Routines,” provided tips on how to hook up on Friday night.
• You remember when vendors had to hang banners out of windows from hotels across the street from the COMMON hotel because vendors were persona non grata at COMMON. Bonus points if you know a vendor who was reprimanded for such heinous behavior. Also, bonus points if you remember when you could open a hotel room window enough to hang a banner out of it.
• Your mind wandered to thinking about your weekend plans as you stood over a line printer waiting on your (very long) code listing to finish.
• You vividly remember the first time you saw your own green fluorescent words on a 5250 terminal.
• You attended Bob Tipton’s “Breaking Out of Your Comfort Zone” at COMMON and six months later left your family’s retail lumber business for a career in computing.

Scoring is purely on the honor system. How did you do? Do you feel old yet?