Ask Felgall

For some unknown reason when I first started writing mainframe JCL articles I ended up writing quite a few about Generation Data Groups of which this one was the first.

What is a GDG?

I spent over twenty years programming mainframe computers using either Cobol or Pl/1 (depending on where I was working at the time). As a result, when I set up my computer help site,, a large section of the site was dedicated to answering mainframe questions.

With the outsourcing of most of the mainframe programming jobs to India I found myself unable to find more mainframe work a few years ago and have since moved on to other things. The mainframe section of the site is still one of the few sources of information about mainframe computers on the web and I still regularly get questions (mostly from people in India) about how to do various things with mainframes.

I still have a number of mainframe books in my collection and so am able to look up some of the information that I can no longer directly remember in order to be able to answer most of those questions.

Mainframes