Posted on 10/10/2009 10:26:34 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
I used to dream COBOL/DB2/CICS in my sleep. Glad those days are over.
The desktop rabble and the Unix mob keep making these claims that “their technology” is going to “kill the mainframe.”
They never will, because so many of these junior varsity hackers don’t understand the IMPORTANT things about mainframes: reliability, stability, uptime.
Period.
There still isn’t a language that is half as useful for business programming as COBOL - even after all these years. How the heck do these ankle biters keep missing the point? What does it take to drive the requirements through their skulls and into their brains? BCD math, report generation, formatting, etc — these are not optional in a business language. The moment that some snot-nosed kid suggests using floating point for accounting, you know that he should still be riding the schoolbus to work.
I didn’t hack mainframes as much as you did, but I sure as hell “get the point” of what makes them essential and impossible to replace in today’s environment.
Personally, I’m sorry to have seen Wang’s VS systems fall to the wayside. I thought they were a great bang:buck solution for smaller businesses. Ran s/370 code, implemented 370 architecture, but with a stack.
The company I retired from incinerated millions over more than a decade on their efforts to first move from S/390 to Sun which was abandoned midstream for Linux on Intel Itanium which was also abandoned before it was even half as far along as the canceled Sun project and then at great expense the S/390 was upgraded to modern z/Series hardware.
Most horrifying of all none of the management responsible for this disaster was fired.
That’s why I like to refer to the “Linux mob” — all these snot-nosed kids, clamoring for “open software” and all this rubbish — and none of these runny-nosed Unix children can keep their eye on the bottom line: the point is to crank out the data, as reliably as possible, at the lowest possible cost.
Mainframes are great for what I like to call “data factories” — outfits like ADP, for example. They’re not there to break new ground, to do research, or play with the latest whizzy software. The mainframe is there go be reliable, solid, safe, predictable and always available.... and do things like crank out people’s paychecks every week, without fail, to do the AP/AR/etc every month, without fail.
I’ve still got my Green Card. The System/360 and /370 had great instruction sets. But it had a bad design flaw: no stack.
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