Modernization Carries Varied Meanings for Different People
March 23, 2020
When the IBM z15 was announced I couldn’t wait to read the information about the advancements and changes that we would all see. I quickly read about System Recovery Boost, integrated zEDC compression, standard rack space frame, double cache density on each chip, etc. The modern mainframe; the fastest, most resilient and high availability, commercially-available […]
ArticlesThe 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 […]
ArticlesMichelle Yeager and Hayley Owens on COBOL Programming
November 4, 2019
Reg Harbeck: I'm Reg Harbeck and today I'm here with Michelle Yeager and Hayley Owens. They are both new COBOL programmers whom I met at SHARE. So maybe let's start; Michelle if you could begin by telling us how did you end up working on the mainframe and being a COBOL programmer? Michelle Yeager: […]
Closing the COBOL Programming Skills Gap
October 25, 2019
The backbone of today’s electronic commerce is COBOL on an IBM Z computing platform. There are 240 billion lines of COBOL in operation, and another 5 billion new lines are added each year. $3 trillion of commercial transactions are processed by COBOL applications each day. COBOL is what business runs on. Some reports indicate that […]
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 […]
ArticlesManaging the IT Project Backlog
September 11, 2019
While IT seems to be an exercise in reading the future and transforming it into business processes, IT often misuses its most vital resource—the people that turn hardware, software and networks into business applications that improve productivity, provide new function, and increase employee effectiveness. Analysts are pulled off projects barely halfway complete, designers are reassigned […]
Podcasts‘Captain COBOL’ Tom Ross on the Evolution of COBOL on Z
September 3, 2019
Reg Harbeck: Hi, this is Reg Harbeck and today I'm here with Tom Ross whose nickname is Captain COBOL and he has been working at IBM on COBOL since the early 1980s. Well Tom before I describe you to the world, why don’t you tell us, how did you end up working at IBM on […]
ArticlesCOBOL Turns 60
May 1, 2019
On April 8, 1959, a team led by Grace Hopper met for the first time to begin developing the specifications for the COBOL programming language. A day short of five years later, on April 7, 1964, the computer platform that would come to be most closely associated with this great programming language was announced: the […]