Published:
November 24 2008, 06:52 PM
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5 Comment(s)
by
Reg Harbeck
"Able Baker Charlie Dog Easy Fox." What? That's not the standard phonetic alphabet! And yet, when referring to the letters A-F in hexadecimal numbers, most mainframers still use these words (which apparently were used by the military from 1941 to 1956 according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet).
Then there's DASD, pronounced "dazz dee" by mainframers, "disk" by non-mainframers.
For that matter, try getting a non-mainframer, let alone a computerized voice for reading text, to pronounce "JES" ("jezz") or "SYSLOG" ("siss log") properly if they haven't been taught to.
Now, I'll grant you, the way we talk about VTOC ("vee tock") is somewhat more portable. Still, pronouncing VTAM ("vee tam") is unlikely to ring a bell, except possibly for those who speak Polish, to whom "witam" (pronounced "vee tam") means "welcome" or "greetings," which seems appropriate in a context of communications.
Similarly, VSAM ("vee sam") is not exactly intuitive, nor is the related IDCAMS ("eye dee cams" or sometimes "id cams").
Which takes me to my next point: sometimes we don't even agree among ourselves how to pronounce something. Another simple example of this is "abend" which is variously pronounced "uh bend" (most commonly in my experience), "ay bend" or "ab end".
My favorite example of such a variation, however, is CICS, which is spelled out by about half the folks in the U.S. (so, "see eye see ess"), pronounced "kicks" in the rest of the English-speaking world, and often pronounced as spelled in other languages. For example, in Italy, it's apparently pronounced "chicks"! I've looked into why there are these two variant pronunciations in the U.S., and as far as I can tell, if your CICS environment was originally established with the help of folks from Poughkeepsie, NY, then you're more likely to spell CICS, and if the folks from Hursley, England (after all, the DFH prefix in CICS programs and messages does stand for "Don't Forget Hursley" right?) first got things running for you, then it's "kicks".
Mind you, even when mainframers and non-mainframers use the same term, there may not be agreement on how to pronounce it - take SQL for example, which used to just be spelled, until someone decided that, since it wasn't the first language used to access databases, they'd call it "see quell." I believe there's now some bleed-over between both sides on how this is pronounced, but my sense is that mainframers still prefer to spell it, and non-mainframers don't.
Interestingly, even numbers get pronounced differently - and not just hexadecimal ones. After all, pronouncing "3270" as "thirty-two seventy" might almost be something of a mainframe shibboleth.
For that matter, classical references such as "shibboleth" (which comes from a Biblical story about one army pursuing another, both of whom spoke the same language, but pronounced the word "shibboleth" differently and so used that as a point of differentiation - see Judges 12:6) seem, at least to me, to be a bit more common in mainframe culture.
At the end of the day (or perhaps more appropriately the end of the week), however, maybe the most important word in the mainframer's vocabulary and culture, when there's a rare IPL scheduled for 2:00 Sunday morning and you're asked to support it, is "yes".
By: Reg Harbeck
Reg Harbeck is CA's Product Management Director for Mainframe Strategy. In the more than two decades since he received his Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science he has worked with operating systems, networks, security and applications on mainframes, UNIX, Linux, Windows and other platforms. Reg...
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