It’s not “cobalt” – though it is often blue. It’s not out-of-date – though programs written in it 60 years ago require very little updating to continue working today. It’s not inefficient – though many of its newest efficiencies don’t require any programming skill to...
For years now, major enterprises – including banks, airlines and insurance companies the world over – have remained faithful to the mainframe to run their core business systems. No surprise, as we all know it remains one of the most dependable, secure and hard-working...
How many computer platforms could justify a headline like that!? Well, it has been almost 50 years since NASA landed a man on the moon, and brought him safely back to Earth, as directed by President John F. Kennedy in his now famous speech to Congress in May of 1961....
It was Bert Lance, Jimmy Carter’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, who made the phrase “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” popular by publicly urging the US government in mid-1977 to adopt it as a motto in order to save billions of dollars annually. He...
Google, Facebook, and Twitter own giant data centers all over the planet, and they are built with racks of commodity hardware. If thousands upon thousands of small servers networked together are good enough for Google, Facebook, and Twitter, then shouldn’t they be...
For the first time ever, we have five generations in the workplace at the same time. This is most profound in a technology like the Mainframe. Fortunately, today a lot of Organizations realize the importance of training the millennials with the aging mainframe...
There’s a bullet aimed at the heart of your business. That bullet is the lie of Bimodal IT, which asserts that you can let your mainframe languish in Waterfall mode while you focus all your agility efforts elsewhere. It’s tempting to believe the Bimodal IT lie —...
The numbers are clear and compelling: Mainframe usage is on the rise: By this year, 64% of mainframe-powered organizations (up from 57% last year) will be running more than half of their business-critical workloads (analytics, blockchain, web, mobile) on the...
No. But it has been a victim of friendly-fire. I’m not sure that there is a headline relating to IT and enterprise software more cliché than the one at the top of this article. Cringeworthy? Perhaps, particularly If you’re in your 4th decade in the mainframe and...
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...
