A NextGen Mainframer Succession Story
September 21, 2020
Dr. Cameron Seay (currently an adjunct professor at East Carolina University; IBM Champion for System Z; and Chair, Open Mainframe Project COBOL Working Group) is one of my personal heroes. When we first met, we had each already begun our journeys of encouraging the development of a new generation of mainframers. My journey began in […]
Articles4 Years: From Marketing Major to Mainframer
June 25, 2020
Four years ago, I was in an office building interviewing for a new position I knew nothing about. I had been working the past eight months doing a sales job that I took out of pure necessity. The real world had made me realize that my marketing degree was not worth nearly as much as […]
ArticlesArvind Krishna Elected IBM CEO, James Whitehurst Elected President
May 4, 2020
Arvind Krishna™ has been elected IBM CEO and a member of the board of directors, effective April 6, 2020. Prior to his new role as CEO, Krishna served as IBM senior vice president for Cloud and Cognitive Software, where he led the IBM business unit that provides the cloud and data platform for IBM clients. […]
ArticlesHomer Ahr Reflects on Working Mission Control for the NASA Apollo Space Program
March 2, 2020
Growing up in the midst of Sputnik and the Cuban Missile Crisis, Homer Ahr’s interests in the space program were piqued early. Ahr became a computer operator for a construction company in his early college years. Inspired to further his career, he taught himself how to program in FORTRAN. Ahr was later asked to work […]
ArticlesHow Millennial Mainframers Can Solve Technology Problems
January 23, 2020
In the book “Stop Guessing: The 9 Behaviors of Great Problem Solvers,” author Nat Greene asserts that poor problem-solving skills cost individuals and society incalculable amounts of time and money. “We waste so much time, money and frustration on bad solutions,” Greene said during a 2017 interview. “I hate that good people have to put up […]
Women in IT Value Community and Mentorship
December 19, 2019
As anyone associated with the industry can tell you, far more men than women have followed career paths in IT—but that trend has been shifting. To amplify the voices of women who are making their own path in IT and innovating on the IBM Z platform, IBM Systems magazine interviewed a group of IT professionals […]
ArticlesMaximum Spooled Files by Job
December 9, 2019
There may be times when a specific job requires more than the default number of spooled files. Here's how to increase the maximum spooled files on a job.
ArticlesTom Harper on Why Mainframe Careers Are Dynamic
May 1, 2019
Reg Harbeck: Hi. I'm Reg Harbeck and today I'm here with Tom Harper who is somebody I consider to be mainframe royalty because he and his family have just had such an amazing deep long involvement with mainframe. His daughter Kristine is one of the cofounders of zNextGen and she is also married to the […]
ArticlesJim Erdahl on Connecting at SHARE
March 1, 2019
Reg Harbeck: My name is Reg Harbeck and I'm here today with Jim Erdahl who is a person who has been very involved with the mainframe and with SHARE, and in fact somebody that I've known for a number of years and worked with at SHARE. Jim, tell us about yourself. How did you end […]
ArticlesPrestart Job Messages
January 4, 2019
This article reviews the messages sent by various types of prestart jobs and provide examples of how to gather useful information from these messages