| SVC 57
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Posted on 08/03/2010 8:13:42 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Help wanted: business application archaeologists…
Teaching mainframe skills is out of vogue at many universities with the advent of newer approaches to solving the biggest computing challenges. At the same time, many of the engineers capable of tinkering with the refrigerator-sized machines are nearing retirement. The average age of mainframe workers is 55 to 60, according to Dayton Semerjian, a senior vice-president at CA Technologies (CA), the second-largest maker of software for mainframe computers after IBM. "The big challenge with the mainframe is that the group that has worked on it—the Baby Boomers—is retiring," Semerjian says. "The demographics are inescapable. If this isn't addressed, it will be trouble for the platform."
From the second page of the article:
The number of mainframes today has dropped to about 10,000, from 30,000 to 40,000 in earlier decades, according to research firm IDC.
(Excerpt) Read more at pbokelly.blogspot.com ...
And it will run that object deck that you compiled on your 360/30 in the 60s.
// MTC WTM,X’181’
/&
One of the BUNCH. :-)
| SVC 57
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My last project manager assignment Hardware located in IBM Connecticut datacenter A six month project with a 8 hour transition. The business managers with wintel applications Absolutely.
was the upgrade of a 9672
to a z9 BC via remote PM
& Application programmers in Philadelphia.
I am located in Rocky Mountains in Colorado.
were amazed how smooth & seamless the transition was.
I’m reminded of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, and later Asimov interviews and writings, about how nuclear power plants will outlive the institutional knowledge of the populace to maintain the nuclear infrastructure, in turn making power plants into cult compounds where hearsay and taboos maintain the nuclear power grid after the last trained engineer dies off.
I graduated h.s. in the late 1990’s, outside of the people who went into the FIRE economy(mortgage sales, wall st etc), and a lady who designs fighter aircraft, the two people I graduated with who make the most are both AS400 admins/programmers. Both got into it because their fathers were programmers in the field and saw year ago this supply/demand problem arising as it is today.
In his early 30’s, one of them could work 80 hours a week if he wanted to and never take a day off for years on end. He’s been forced to scale back now that he’s a new dad, but in the face of the real UE problems for others our age, he has rock solid job security.
An old IBM 1401 Autocoder programmer here...
You could write programs to make the big chain-driven printers play tunes.
Here’s a great example (”Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head”) that someone posted on that new-fangled Internet-thingie:
http://www.ed-thelen.org/1401Project/Mak-1403_raindrops.mp3
(The tune starts after a few seconds of noise.)
At LLNL, each night at mid-night, they turned off the IBM 1401. Its price tag was about $1,000,000 and it had 5 big floor mounted tape drives and could only read tape or punched cards. The output was punched cards or an impact line-printer with a rotating metal belt and hammers that hit the correct letter as it went by. The memory was 4k of 64 bit words and it had a FORTRAN compiler on tape. To start the computer, one had to hand program the first few instructions to start reading the system tape. There was no EPROM or BIOS in those days. They allowed me to use the IBM 1401 from midnight until 6:00AM for about 6 months and I did all my engineering lab reports and much of my homework in FORTRAN. I lived with that machine for 6 months, in 1965.
Good Hunting... from Varmint Al
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I'll BDAM'd.