[comp.lang.asm370] MVS debuggers

LDW@USCMVSA.BITNET (Leonard D Woren) (11/18/90)

> Are there any affordable products available in the commercial arena?  And for
> MVS TSO ???

   There is XDC from Cole Software.  It is not affordable, and they
aren't willing to make any deals at all.  For some reason I seem to
think XDC used to be the Yale Debugger.  If this is true, Cole's
unwillingness to cut the price for universities is particularly
obnoxious.

/Leonard

RAF@NIHCU.BITNET (Roger Fajman) (11/19/90)

>    There is XDC from Cole Software.  It is not affordable, and they
> aren't willing to make any deals at all.  For some reason I seem to
> think XDC used to be the Yale Debugger.  If this is true, Cole's
> unwillingness to cut the price for universities is particularly
> obnoxious.

Yes, XDC is the XA version of DBC, which was originally developed at
Yale.  For a while, Yale made it available free, but then entered into
agreement with Computer Systems Research to sell it commercially.  More
recently, Cole Software (which is the author Dave Cole and, I think,
one other person) purchased all rights from Yale.  The product is still
marketed by CSR.

We have had the product for many years, having originally gotten the
free version from Yale and later purchasing the commercial version.  It
is vastly superior to TSO TEST and can also be used to debug JES2 and
other non-TSO programs.

Our objection is to their copy protection.  We have 6 CPUs, but only 2
licenses, since the product is used only on TSO and our delevopment
system.  If TSO gets moved to another CPU for any reason (say a
hardware failure), we cannot use XDC there without getting a zap from
Cole Software to change the CPU serial numbers in the program.  This
takes time, even more because there are only a couple of people who can
make up the zaps.  The price for a 6 CPU license is astronomical.

Roger Fajman                                   Telephone:  +1 301 402 1246
National Institutes of Health                  BITNET:     RAF@NIHCU
Bethesda, Maryland, USA                        Internet:   RAF@CU.NIH.GOV