Boy do I remember those days.
COBOL/CICS and JCL with VSAM structures.
DELETE/DEFINE files before loading them.
Fun stuff and pretty easy.
I even did Assembler for my old banks connections from the branches to the mainframe. Quickest code to read the deposit/withdraw information back and forth to the branches.
You and me both. I did programming for a large health insurance company. We did our CICS work in Telon MVS using the old IBM TSO dumb terminals. Ah, those were the days! The fast routines were written in assembler.
I also did a stint with the statistical group there, writing batch COBOL programs that would take 7 years’ worth of claims data and crunch the numbers to produce reams of reports for the actuarial analysts. Some of those programs took days to run, heh heh! My pride and joy was a 7-layer array.
Oh, speaking of the jobs that took days; I remember putting CHECKPOINT RESTART in the JCL in case there was a problem somewhere. That way, if it croaked on tape number 130 of 145, they didn’t have to restart the whole think on tape number 1.