Source Program Maintenance Online II

Source Program Maintenance Online II (with abbreviations such as SPM, SPM/OL, or SPMOL-II, and pronounced "S-P-M" or, informally, "Spimoli"), is an IBM software product of the late 1970s and early 1980s that provided an online environment for computer programmers working on IBM mainframe systems.

[1] Source programs could be stored on disk under SPM and retrieved for editing and submitted as a batch job stream.

[2] SPM was a popular choice for IBM mainframe sites seeking an online editing environment that were not running MVS/TSO or VM/CMS.

[3] This might be done by having a JCL catalogued procedure that did the compile-and-link action could be coded with error and warning messages going to SYSOUT=R, and then the SPM user could access them via the RPDO function.

[10] The reports covered the members and indices of the SPIN, HPIN, and PPIN libraries of SPM and could be broken out by programmer.

[3] An advertorial run by IBM in Computerworld in 1979 quoted a company in the food and drinks industry as saying that once their developers started using SPM, their productivity improved by 50 percent.

[14] Technical writers could also benefit, as SPM could be used to run the SCRIPT/VS text markup language formatter and view the output.

[15] While SPM had an auditing capability, many IBM mainframe sites used established, batch-oriented third-party software products such as The Librarian for keeping track of changes to programs.

[6] A survey taken by IDC in 1979 found that about half of all System/370 sites used some kind of on-line editing and submission product for program development.

[4] SPM was popular enough that by the early 1980s, IBM had put out another field-developed program, called VM/CMS Library Maintenance and SPMOL-II Simulator, that emulated the line number-oriented aspects of SPM edit commands within the editor in the VM/CMS environment, in order, as IBM literature said, to "ease the transition for users moving from SPMOL-II to VM/CMS.