CICS (Customer Information Control System) is a transaction server that runs primarily on IBM mainframe systems under z/OS or z/VSE. CICS on distributed platforms is called TXSeries and it is available on AIX, Windows, Solaris and HP-UX. CICS is also available on other operating systems, notably i5/OS, OS/2. The z/OS implementation, ie, CICS Transaction Server for z/OS is by far the most popular and significant. It is known foremost as a pseudo-conversational computer application. Software to allow working with transactions in a safe environment. ... SAS 8 on an IBM mainframe under 3270 emulation An IBM mainframe is a mainframe computer made by IBM. // From 1952 into the late 1960s, IBM manufactured and marketed several large computer models, known as the IBM 700/7000 series. ... z/OS Welcome Screen seen through a terminal emulator The title of this article begins with a capital letter due to technical limitations. ... VSE (Virtual Storage Extended) is an operating system on the IBM System/370 and System/390 mainframe computers. ... TXSeries for Multiplatforms® is CICS® (Customer Information Control System) on distributed platforms. ... AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive) is a proprietary operating system developed by IBM based on UNIX System V. Before the product was ever marketed, the acronym AIX originally stood for Advanced IBM UNIX. AIX has pioneered numerous network operating system enhancements, introducing new innovations later adopted by Unix-like operating systems... Microsoft Windows is the name of several families of proprietary software operating systems by Microsoft. ... Solaris is a computer operating system developed by Sun Microsystems. ... HP-UX (Hewlett Packard UniX) is Hewlett-Packards proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system, based on System V (initially System III). ... OS/400 is an operating system used on IBMs line of AS/400 (now called iSeries) minicomputers. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...

CICS is a transaction processing system designed for both online and batch activity. On large IBM zSeries and System z9 servers, CICS easily supports thousands of transactions per second, making it a mainstay of enterprise computing. CICS applications can be written in numerous programming languages, including COBOL, PL/I, C, C++, IBM Basic Assembly Language, REXX, and Java. Since December, 2001, IBM designates all its mainframes with the name eServer zSeries, with the e depicted in IBMs well-known red trademarked symbol. ... IBM System z9 System z9 is the newest and most powerful line of IBM mainframes. ... A programming language is an artificial language that can be used to control the behavior of a machine, particularly a computer. ... COBOL is a third-generation programming language, and one of the oldest programming languages still in active use. ... PL/I (Programming Language One, pronounced pee el one) is an imperative computer programming language designed for scientific, engineering, and business applications. ... C is a general-purpose, block structured, procedural, imperative computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system. ... C++ (pronounced see plus plus, IPA: ) is a general-purpose, high-level programming language with low-level facilities. ... BAL (Basic Assembly Language) is a low-level language used on IBM z/Series mainframes. ... REXX (REstructured eXtended eXecutor) is an interpreted programming language which was developed at IBM. It is a structured high-level programming language which was designed to be both easy to learn and easy to read. ... The Java platform is the name for a computing environment, or platform, from Sun Microsystems which can run applications developed using the Java programming language and set of development tools. ...

Each CICS program is initiated using a transaction id. CICS screens are sent as maps using a programming language such as COBOL. The end user inputs data which is made accessible to the program by receiving a map. CICS screens may contain text that is highlighted, having different colors or blinking. An example of how a map can be sent through COBOL is given below.

 EXEC CICS SEND MAPSET(MPS1) MAP(MP1) END-EXEC. 

CICS is used in bank teller applications, airline reservation systems, ATM systems etc. CICS first went on sale on July 8, 1969, not long after IMS. It was originally developed in the United States at IBM's Palo Alto lab. In 1974, CICS development shifted to IBM's programming labs in Hursley, United Kingdom, where work continues today. July 8 is the 189th day of the year (190th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... For the Stargate SG-1 episode, see 1969 (Stargate SG-1). ... Information Management System (IMS) is a joint hierarchical database and information management system. ... Location of Palo Alto within Santa Clara County, California. ... For the American soap opera creators of the same family name, please see Frank and Doris Hursley. ...

While CICS has its highest profile among financial institutions such as banks and insurance companies, over 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies are reported to rely on CICS (running on z/OS) for their core business functions. Most state and national governments do as well. The Fortune 500 is a ranking of the top 500 United States corporations as measured by gross revenue. ...

Although when CICS is mentioned people usually mean CICS Transaction Server, "CICS Family" refers to a portfolio of transaction servers, connectors (called CICS Transaction Gateway) and CICS Tools.

Recent CICS Transaction Server enhancements include support for Web services and Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs). IBM began shipping the latest and a very popular release, CICS Transaction Server Version 3.1 for z/OS, in early 2005. The W3C defines a Web service[1] as a software system designed to support interoperable Machine to Machine interaction over a network. ... The Enterprise Java Beans specification is one of the several Java APIs in the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition. ...

Version 3.2 was announced in 2007 which includes further enhancements in the web services area.

History

When CICS was first released, it supported programs written in IBM Assembler, PL/I and COBOL. Programs needed to be quasi-reentrant to support multiple concurrent transaction threads. Its modular design meant that with judicious "pruning" it could be executed on a computer with just 32K of real memory (including the Operating System of 8K) such as an IBM 360 model 30. See the terminology section, below, regarding inconsistent use of the terms assembly and assembler. ... PL/I (Programming Language One, pronounced pee el one) is an imperative computer programming language designed for scientific, engineering, and business applications. ... COBOL is a third-generation programming language, and one of the oldest programming languages still in active use. ... A computer program or routine is described as reentrant if it can be safely called recursively or from multiple processes. ... A transaction is an agreement, communication, or movement carried out between separate entities or objects. ... A thread in computer science is short for a thread of execution. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Primary storage. ... An operating system (OS) is a set of computer programs that manage the hardware and software resources of a computer. ... The IBM System/360 (S/360) is a computer system family announced by International Business Machines on April 7, 1964. ...

Each unique CICS "Task" or transaction was allocated its own dynamic memory at start-up and subsequent requests for additional memory were handled by a call to the "Storage Control program" (part of the CICS nucleus - or "kernel"). This is analogous to an Operating System and effectively CICS could be considered "an Operating System within an Operating System" with its own rules and calls for services such as I/O or program calls (Link to or transfer control to). CICS was in fact started as a batch program with standard JCL statements. A task is an execution path through address space. In other words, a set of program instructions that is loaded in memory. ... This article or section does not cite any references or sources. ... A kernel connects the application software to the hardware of a computer. ... Energy Input: The energy placed into a reaction. ... Insert non-formatted text hereBatch processing is the execution of a series of programs (jobs) on a computer without human interaction, when possible. ... Job Control Language (JCL) is a scripting language used on IBM mainframe operating systems to instruct the Job Entry Subsystem (that is, JES2 or JES3) on how to run a batch program or start a subsystem. ...

Because application programs could be shared by many concurrent threads, the use of static variables embedded within a program (or use of Operating System memory) was restricted (by convention only). Computer software (or simply software) refers to one or more computer programs and data held in the storage of a computer for some purpose. ... Parallel programming (also concurrent programming), is a computer programming technique that provides for the execution of operations concurrently, either within a single computer, or across a number of systems. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Variable. ...

Unfortunately many of the "rules" were frequently broken, especially by COBOL programmers who were frequently unaccustomed to the internals of their programs or else did not use the necessary restrictive compile time options. This resulted in "non re-entrant" code that was often unreliable leading to many spurious storage violations and entire CICS system crashes. In computer science, compile time, as opposed to runtime, is the time when a compiler compiles code written in a programming language into an executable form. ... It has been suggested that STORAGE VIOLATIONS be merged into this article or section. ...

The entire partition or region operated with the same memory protection key including the CICS kernel code and so program corruption and CICS control block corruption was a frequent cause of system downtime. A partition is a subset of data processing system hardware resources allocated to an operating system wherein there is no overlap in resources allocated to two partitions. ... Look up Region in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Memory protection is a system that prevents one process from corrupting the memory of another process running on the same computer at the same time. ...

These shortcomings nevertheless persisted for multiple new releases of CICS over a period of more than 20 years and, as stated above, were often critical applications used by large Banks and other financial institutions.

It was possible to provide a good measure of advance protection by performing all testing under control of a monitoring program that also served to provide Test/Debug features. One such software offering was known as OLIVER which prevented application programs corrupting memory using instruction simulation. OLIVER (CICS interactive test/debug) was a proprietary test/debigging toolkit for interactively testing programs designed to run on IBMs Customer Information Control System (C.I.C.S.) on IBMs System/360/370/390 architecture. ... Look up simulation in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

System calls to CICS (for example to read a record from a file) were elicited by a macro call and this gave rise to the later terminology "macro level CICS". An example of a call to the "File Control Program" of CICS might look like this:- A macro in computer science is an abstraction, that defines how a certain input pattern is replaced by an output pattern according to a defined set of rules. ...

 DFHFC TYPE=READ,DATASET=myfile,TYPOPER=UPDATE,....etc 

This was converted by a pre-compile Assembly which expanded the conditional assembly language macros to their COBOL or PL/1 CALL statement equivalents. Thus preparing a HLL application was effectively a "two stage" compile; output from the Assembler fed straight into the HLL compiler as input. See the terminology section, below, regarding inconsistent use of the terms assembly and assembler. ... A Conditional Assembly Language is that part of an Assembly Language used to write macros. ... A high-level programming language is a programming language that, in comparison to low-level programming languages, may be more abstract, easier to use, or more portable across platforms. ... This article is about the computing term. ...

Command Level CICS:

During the 1980s, IBM at Hursley produced a "half-way house" version of CICS which supported what became known as "Command Level CICS". This release still supported the older programs but introduced a new layer of execution to the new Command level application programs. A typical Command level call was given in the first MAPSET example above. This was pre-processed by a pre-compile batch translation stage which converted the embedded Command calls (EXEC's) into Call statements to a stub sub-routine. So, preparing application programs for later execution still required two stages. It was possible to write "Mixed mode" applications using both Macro level and Command level statements.

At execution time, the carefully built Command level calls were converted back using a run-time translator ("The EXEC Interface Program"; part of the CICS supplied nucleus) to the old Macro level call which was then executed by the mostly unchanged CICS nucleus programs.

CEDF: This IBM-produced "Command Execution Diagnostic Facility" helped debug 'EXEC CICS' calls by showing before and after results. The "OLIVER" software pre-dated this free add on by more than 10 years and yet CEDF came without any form of memory protection. It was however complementary to OLIVER, and both could be used simultaneously.

Command level only CICS was introduced in the early 1990s which offered some advantages over earlier versions of CICS. However IBM also dropped support for Macro level application programs written for earlier versions. This "forced" many application programs to be converted or completely re-written to use Command level EXEC calls only, usually by programmers who had no exposure to earlier versions or to the original code.

By this time there were perhaps millions of programs worldwide that had been executing fairly reliably; for decades in many cases. Re-writing them inevitably introduced new bugs without necessarily adding new features.

Run time conversion: It was however possible to execute old macro level programs using conversion software such as "Command CICS" produced by APT International a former CICS Software Specialist company who had earlier produced OLIVER, described above. It was possible to take advantage of the new features of later versions of CICS whilst at the same time retaining the original unaltered codebase. It is believed that there are still programs running today using this same technology. The overhead was minimal since additional overhead was limited to the CICS calls only.

Z notation. Part of CICS was formalized using the Z notation in the 1980s and 1990s in collaboration with the Oxford University Computing Laboratory, under the leadership of Sir Tony Hoare. This work won a Queen's Award for Technological Achievement. The Z notation (universally pronounced zed, named after Zermelo-Fränkel set theory) is a formal specification language used for describing and modelling computing systems. ... The Oxford University Computing Laboratory (OUCL) is the computer science department at Oxford University in England. ... Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare (Tony Hoare or C.A.R. Hoare, born January 11, 1934) is a British computer scientist, probably best known for the development of Quicksort, the worlds most widely used sorting algorithm, and perhaps even the worlds most widely used algorithm of any kind... The Queens Award for Enterprise is an award for British companies and other organizations who excel at international trade, innovation or sustainable development. ...

Pronunciation

• In Britain, Canada, Australia, France, Belgium and some other countries, CICS is pronounced the same as the word kicks. In the US, it is more usually pronounced by reciting each letter (C-I-C-S). Both pronunciations are popular.
• In Germany, it is pronounced zicks and, less often, kicks
• In Italy, it is pronounced chicks.
• In Spain it is pronounced thicks.
• In Brazil, Peru and Mexico, it is pronounced sicks.
• In Ohio (USA), it is sometimes pronounced zhvicks (due mainly to the hybrid eastern hill accents).

See also

• TXSeries
• 3270
• z/TPF
• WebSphere
• VSAM
• Command CICS a run-time macro to Command level translator

TXSeries for Multiplatforms® is CICS® (Customer Information Control System) on distributed platforms. ... Clemson Universitys Library Catalog The IBM 3270 is a class of terminals made by IBM (known as Display Devices) normally used to communicate with IBM mainframes. ... TPF is also the NASA Terrestrial Planet Finder project. ... WebSphere refers to a brand of proprietary IBM software products, although the term also popularly refers to one specific product: WebSphere Application Server (WAS). ... Virtual Sequential Access Method (VSAM) is an IBM disk file storage scheme first used in the S/370 and virtual storage. ...

External links

• IBM CICS Family official website
• CICS official 35th Anniversary website
• Bob Yelavich's CICS focussed website. (archived copy from 24 September 2004)
• CICS User Community website for CICS related news, announcements and discussions