IMS

Why Ansible Is Emerging as a Top Automation Tool for Mainframes

Mainframe sites used to be like small factories in terms of the number of people that were needed to keep the machine running. There were lots of operators who spent their time feeding in card decks and changing tapes on the tape drives. There were systems programmers and application programmers, and a whole host of […]

Can IMS Connect to the Outside World?

Information Management System (IMS) was developed by IBM, with Rockwell and Caterpillar Inc., starting in 1966 as a bill of materials system for the Apollo space program. It went live in 1968, making it over 50 years old. Like everything else on the mainframe, it has been updated and extended since that time. As you […]

Jeff Cherrington on Rocket Software’s Evolution and IBM Z Contributions

Reg Harbeck: Hi, this is Reg Harbeck and today I'm here with my friend and colleague Jeff Cherrington who is the vice president of product management, Z Systems—I think I missed a word or two there—at Rocket Software. So, Jeff, I guess what we're going to talk about today is just the whole journey that Rocket […]

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Rocket Software - IBM Z/mainframe

Mainframe Connectivity: What’s Missing?

We can, perhaps, all remember a time when a simple 3270 terminal emulator was all we needed to access the mainframe without needing a directly-connected terminal. And we were really pleased that we could work from anywhere using this simple solution to our communication problem. It worked and our expectations were not very high. Next, […]

How the Software World and Programming Practices Have Evolved

Programming, or writing software as it is commonly known today, has been my profession for 51 years, and for fun for 10 years before that. Like most things, it has changed dramatically as I have grown up with it. Starting out in 1960, we had only one manual of about 50 pages, a principles of […]

An Introduction to IBM IMS OTMA

IMS Open Transaction Manager Access (OTMA) is a component of IMS TM and is a transaction-based, connectionless client/server protocol

Understanding IMS OTMA Commit Mode and Synchronization Level

The IMS OTMA client communicates information to IMS and receives information from IMS in a prefix passed in front of the message (or command). Among several information present in the prefix are COMMIT MODE and SYNCHRONIZATION (SYNC) LEVEL. OTMA SYNC Level The OTMA client specifies the sync level on each input message. The OTMA sync […]

Understanding How a ‘CM0 SL1’ Input Message Sent to IMS Connect Works in the Case of a Client NAK

IMS Connect (ICON) is the TCP/IP gateway for IMS. So, besides running the traditional IMS transactions on z/OS, an IMS programmer/database administrator (DBA) can now leverage applications running on the distributed side of the world (a Java web application, for example) to be able to easily talk to IMS databases. The Java web application would […]

When the Phone Rings in the Middle of the Night

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 […]

IT Change and Renewal

Approaches and tactics to address challenges like breathing new life into applications.