Michelle 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: […]
ArticlesClosing 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 […]
COBOL 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 […]
ArticlesA Closer Look at the 2018 Master the Mainframe Winners
May 1, 2019
For a decade and a half, students from around the world have been taking part in IBM’s annual Master the Mainframe competition. Designed as an introduction to the world of z/OS programming, the contest requires no prior knowledge or skills, and leads participants from their first taste of the UI and the concepts that underpin […]
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.
ArticlesDevOps Tools for z/OS
January 1, 2019
Can DevOps tools work for z/OS? Yes, and there are two current methodologies which can enable using tools like Eclipse, Jenkins, GIT and many others. One methodology, which most of the mainframe community has likely heard about, is Zowe. Zowe is the first open-source framework for z/OS and was announced at SHARE in St. Louis. […]