Is Fable the Best RPG Ever? No, RPG/400 Was!

Ok, it was pretty stupid of me on October 3 to get hooked by the headline "Was Fable the Best RPG Ever?" in PCWorld.

No, I said.  First of all, there is the Clintonian answer:

"It depends on what the meaning of best is."

But, second, clearly the best RPG was IBM III and its sibling RPG/400.  In fact, what the hell was Fable RPG? There was a DEC RPG and a Honeywell RPG and Data General RPG. There probably was a Wang RPG. But I don't remember a Fable RPG.

Anyways IBM RPG circa 1965, especially III and 400 circa 1985, spawned what is today the $30 billion a year ERP market (just in enterprise software sales, not counting systems and services drag of 3X to 10X depending on the year).  Actually the term ERP didn't exist then. It was MRP for material requirements planning and then MRP II for manufacturing resoruce planning.

The term ERP was coined by Gartner around 1995. When I joined IDC in 1997 from Datapro where I was the "the ERP analyst," I was told not to use the term ERP because Gartner coined it. No kidding.

The ERP market started with the granddaddy of them all, RPG-based IBM MAPICS, still being marketed and supported I believe by Infor. Marcam was designed as ERP for discrete manufacturers so a Mapics distributor named MARCAM wrote a version for process manufacturers also in RPG.

And there was J.D. Edwards World and predecessors, which now can be found somewhere in Oracle (ORCL), SSA BPCS before BPCS VI (also in Infor as is Marcam but not necessarily the RPG version), initial Intentia products -- now part of Lawson (LAWS) -- and many other early leaders of the ERP market circa 1985-1995 were also originally written in RPG.  Actually a better term would be written dependent upon RPG.

This 2007 article says there are still 3000 Edwards World users. That's based on some Internet browsing -- so don't take it as gospel -- which also says MAPICS added a Java version to go with its RPG version around 2000 whereas Intentia ported all of its products to Java and left RPG behind shortly thereafter.

Both SSA and Marcam infamously tried to write object-oriented (OO)-based versions of their RPG products in the late 1990s, with Marcam just falling short as often happens because OO was so new at the time and SSA falling short spectacularly with SEC investigations and founders supposedly hiding in Hong Kong or some such place.

Given its role in ERP -- not to mention all the in-house developed RPG software for the AS/400 and predecessors -- the IBM Report Program Generator III has to be the best RPG ever.

So I whipped off my answer to PCWorld. 

Boy, do I feel old... and stupid.

(Sidenote: Before I get a deluge of email from people even older than me, I consider COPICS to be the great granddady of ERP.)

-- Dennis Byron

(no interest in companies mentioned) 

Comments

[Frank Scavo]

Well, Dennis you beat me to the punch with your COPICS reference at the end, which I implemented at an oil services firm in 1979. No better way than to learn what a bill of material explosion is than to learn it in IBM assembly language. Ugh.

As for early RPG ERP-like systems, don't forget PCR's RMS, which was acquired by Pansophic in 1987 and renamed PRMS. Pansophic was then acquired by CA, which eventually sold it to SSA, which reorganized and was acquired by Infor in 2002, where it lives today.

Legend has it that the origins of BPCS actually are in the PRMS system. Roger Covey, founder of SSA saw that there wasn't an AS400 version of PRMS, so he wrote one based on the PRMS design (which was S/36 based). Folks that worked on both often commented on the similarities.

[Dennis Byron]

Thanks Frank

And I didn't want to drone on but I think COPICS is still being supported and marketed by some ISV in mid America where -- like me -- they didn't know that RPG meant remotely played game.

Dennis