The Many Faces of Application Creation: Part 2
March 16, 2020
This is a continuation of last month’s article, which chronicled application tools and options in context of development projects I’ve worked in and programming alternatives used, including design, coding, and validation. I’ve used various programming facilities, along with their strengths and weaknesses. My experiences start in the early 1970s, and the evolution I’ve experienced spans […]
ArticlesThe Many Faces of Application Creation: Part 1
February 20, 2020
While my career has mostly been consulting, marketing, systems programming and management, I’ve also had numerous engagements in application programming and design. A class in COBOL was my first IT experience, and in my MBA program, I learned Fortran and General Purpose Simulation System (GPSS) in Operations Research classes. In 1975, I rewrote a broken […]
PodcastsDusty Rivers on IMS, CICS, Db2 and IBM Z
December 5, 2019
Reg Harbeck: Hi, this is Reg Harbeck and today I'm here with Dusty Rivers, an experienced IBM mainframe expert, an IMS person who has been working all across the mainframe ecosystem especially in areas that has gotten enough attention that he has been able to be an IBM Champion for the past 10 years as […]
ArticlesRay Mullins on Assembler, COBOL and PL/1
October 1, 2019
Reg Harbeck: Hi, this is Reg Harbeck and today I'm here with Ray Mullins who is a friend of mine and fellow mainframer who I've known from SHARE and various other parts of the mainframe ecosystem for quite some time. It turns out we have a lot of common interests, including languages and of course […]
ArticlesWebSphere Is a Foundation With Useful Tools
September 10, 2019
Joseph Gulla continues his series on WebSphere, writing about extensions to the different product foundations in the form of developer tools.
When the Phone Rings in the Middle of the Night
August 16, 2019
It’s been decades since I had a 9:00 to 5:00 job, only the earliest weeks of my IT career. Training kept me out of town a lot, and becoming a participating project member took a few months to attain, but once I’d become an accountable project member, my working hours extended into evenings because of […]
ArticlesApplication Performance and Tuning
May 14, 2019
As the original author of “CICS Performance Bulletin” published by IBM Dallas System Center, and co-author of the subsequent IBM “CICS TS Performance Guide” in conjunction with IBM Hursley CICS TS Development, performance and tuning has been a big part of my job. I’ve performed more CICS performance studies than I can count, and almost […]
ArticlesTraditional and Nontraditional Approaches to Application Modernization
March 18, 2019
A discussion of traditional and nontraditional approaches and techniques for application modernization.
ArticlesStrategies, Methods and Toolsets for Modernization
February 18, 2019
A systematic and organized approach to application modernization.
ArticlesMaking Informed Technological Decisions
September 1, 2018
In my early system engineering years with IBM, my primary account was a large insurance company in central Wisconsin that was a leading-edge user of CICS [1] and one of the higher volume online systems in the world. Their advanced, heavily-used, real-time and transaction-based business applications stressed IBM’s largest S/370 processors to their limits. Transaction growth […]