BR14
I think I can code JCL in my sleep....
i worked for a mainframe company from 1988-1999... some of the best years of my career... i think i still have a poster of a mainframe rolled up somewhere...
bump
I love the quote in this story from the young developer about efficiency, speed, and programmer control. The kids these days don’t know squat about conserving resources or making system calls. I think the engineering programs should at least teach the concept of writing code for speed, efficiency, and resource conservation (disk space, memory allocation, etc.). Sadly, their philosophy is that memory, disk space, and bandwidth are cheap and always will be.
crap...I hope this don’t catch on. I have a nice little niche going on.
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.