What’s the Operator’s Pal?

Earlier this month, while I was in Europe, the topic of OPAL came up and I was asked about its origin. Richard Jacobson, our founder, created OPAL and coined the acronym, which stands for OPerator Assistance Language. OPAL was introduced with Robot/CONSOLE in 1990. OPAL was first designed to give customers flexibility for handling events and messages in QSYSOPR. When a message arrives, OPAL provides the ability to use IF-THEN-ELSE logic to process it. I like to think of OPAL as a macro language that can do just about anything an operator can.

Around 1995, OPAL was added to Robot/REPORTS to perform conditional processing based on the contents of a report. OPAL can do some really wild things, like highlight or exclude lines or columns, e-mail someone, build an index for a report, store a value, launch a Robot/SCHEDULE job, and more. I like to think of Robot/REPORTS OPAL as an electronic decision-making tool.

In 1997, OPAL arrived in Robot/SCHEDULE, version 7.0. In Robot/SCHEDULE, OPAL checks on resources that might be tied to batch processes. It processes jobs or performs other actions based on file arrivals, jobs running, people signed on the system, days of the week, and other events and activities. With OPAL logic, Robot/SCHEDULE can skip, run, or delay any particular job at any particular time.

Over the years we've joked that OPAL actually stands for the operator's “Old PAL,” because it has allowed so many of you to automate so many different processes. Where would we be without our old pal, OPAL?