Dougie Lawson

I was born on 9th April 1963. I married Debbie Attwood in June 1986 and we have three children Bryony (16th May 1992), Frayne (16th Oct 1994), Hadrian (21st March 1997 - died 20th Dec 1998) and Konrad (4th Feb 2000).

After leaving school in July 1981, at age 18, with 10 'O' Levels and 3 'A' Levels, I started work in September 1981 for National Westminster Bank plc in the UK. Initially as an IBM 3890 cheque sorter operator. I then moved to the department that wrote operational documentation using DCF/Script and GML. Finally moving to the group responsible for writing production JCL, CLISTs and some ISPF dialogs for the operations department.

Natwest taught me S/370 assembler programming in 1982. After that I joined the Systems Programming group as a junior IMS Systems Programmer, starting just as the Bank was installing IMS 1.3.

Between 1982 and 1994 I mostly worked on IMS and DB2 (from V1.2). Natwest, also, let me try Unisys 'A' series (which included WFL and a bit of ALGOL), VM/SP (used for Profs), VM XA/SF (used for MVS/JES3 Guest machines) and CICS System Programming. I also worked on the VS COBOL II and PL/I 2.3 migrations.

I left NatWest in May 1994 (after twelve years, ten months) and joined IBM as a contract Systems Programmer. At IBM, I work in Enterprise/ASSIST based in Basingstoke, Hampshire as the resident IMS, DB2 and Linux for S/390 expert. Since joining IBM I have attended most of the Info/Man courses and now enjoy answering all the Info/Man questions.

In February 1998 we moved house from Dagenham to Basingstoke (five miles from IBM's offices). Between May 1994 and Feb 1998 I was commuting for 1 ¾ hours per day each way - across London by Tube then out to Basingstoke on South-West Trains. I'm now able to cycle to Basingstoke in 12 minutes and back home in 15 minutes (uphill).

In December 2002 I joined IBM as a regular employee.

In July 2003, IBM moved my base location from Basingstoke to Farnborough. I now work at home for four days a week.

I am treasurer for the UK GSE IMS Working Group.

I support four major products, most programming languages and a collection of minor products.

The major products are:

IMS (tm) since 1982.

IMS/VS 1.3, 2.1(*), 2.2, 3.1, 4.1(*)§
IMS/ESA V5.1 Database Manager§(*)
IMS/ESA V5.1 Transaction Manager§(*)
IMS/ESA V6.1 Database Manager(*)§
IMS/ESA V6.1 Transaction manager(*)§
IMS V7 (*)
IMS V8 (*)
IMS V9 (*)

Database 2 (tm) since 1986

DB2 1.2, 1.3, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 3.1§(*)
DB2 for MVS V4.1§(*)§
DB2 for OS/390 V5.1(*)§
DB2 for OS/390 V6.1(*)§
DB2 for OS/390 V7.1 (*)
DB2 for z/OS V8.1 (*)

I've not worked with these releases (*) in production systems.

Information Management (tm) since 1995.

Info/Man 4.2.2, 5.1, 6.1§, 6.2§, 6.2.1§
Info/Man V6.3§
Tivoli TME 10 Info/Man V1.1§
TSD 1.2
IBM Tivoli Info/Man V7.1

§These releases are no longer supported by IBM.

The programming languages and minor products are:

High Level Assembler
COBOL
PL/1
REXX
C
Pascal
Fortran
C++
Netview Info/man Autobridge (from the I/M side)
QMF

The other major product is:

Linux for S/390

Apache
SAMBA
Perl
LaTeX
TCP/IP
JavaScript
Java

My interests include technology, civil engineering, astronomy, archeology, swimming, sci-fi, home computing, ice skating, reading, walking, cycling, travelling and my classic car. I sometimes read the Daily Telegraph and I subscribe to Private Eye. I'm a member of North Hampshire Road Club (cycling), Basingstoke Classic Car Club and The Traction Owner's Club (my classic car is a Citroën Traction Avant Light 15). I'm also a member of the Kempshott and Hatch Warren Support Group for St Michael's Hospice which, mainly, involves helping with fund raising.

I run SuSE 8.2 Linux and Windows ME on an ethernet LAN at home. So can get most PC word processors, spreadsheets etc to do what I want.

Website created by: [Darkside Information Systems Ltd]