In Application Architecture: an Evolutionary View I wrote of the way that computers have evolved from the mainframe era of the 1970’s to today’s interconnected world, where mainframes and other servers communicate with PC’s and mobile devices to provide services that...
The Mainframe Era In 1970 I joined a company, Databank Systems Ltd, that operated a national network of 6 computer centres, each containing a S360/40. In total this was less than 1/10,000th of the power of my current laptop, at a cost several thousand times...
Mainframe users have a problem: finding people with the right skills to service their mission-critical systems. It isn’t language: learning COBOL and PL/I is relatively easy. The difficult part is understanding the logic of systems built by programmers who...