Major stuff going on with this announcement!
I can still do JCL and Cobol.
"I can still do JCL and Cobol." I used to program in JCL on IBM 370's to upload and download huge flat files into UNIX machines. While at the Labs, my expertise went from IC design to UNIX Admin, and database development on small UNIX based machines up to large mainframes. We had a lot of very large Amhdals and a Cray as well to play games with. Of course the Cray was not interactive, one would run a job on a 370 front end, that then sent the job (IC design simulations, typically) to the Cray. What might take ten hours to run on a lightly loaded 370 might take ten minutes on our Cray or perhaps some twenty minutes or more on an Amhdal. The Amhdals had their UNIX variant.
What will prove a riot is if Z9 turns out to be some form of super parallel process Linux system, e.g runs on say 500 processors.
You CAN still do ...
I AM still DOING JCL and COBOL and learning CL and RPG.
I'm sitting in a shop where we are merging one company on a VSE box with another company on an AS-400. (Why yes, as a matter of fact, we are behind the times.) All while keeping both "companies" running as separate divisions on their separate boxes. Parallel testing starts in September.
Target is to convert everything again in 2 years to a Windows based system.
Sure there's upheaval and strife. There's also a good probability of continued employment for an adaptable geek.
Yes. But have you ever done SNOBOL?