Every technical field develops its own language, and the mainframe world is no exception. Whether we’re talking about the alphabet soup of multi-letter acronyms or terms that have been part of the platform for decades, mainframe jargon serves as a kind of shorthand...
With summer blockbuster season upon us, it’s time to turn our attention away from the workaday world of the datacenter to its fictional representation. Mainframes have made memorable appearances on both the big and small screen for decades—sometimes portrayed as...
This month at Planet Mainframe Trivia, we've been exploring how organizations maximize the value of their mainframe investments. Creating value doesn't end once a project is approved. Organizations continually look for ways to improve performance, optimize resources,...
For July’s Planet Mainframe Trivia Quizzes, we're exploring the fundamentals of measuring value and making informed technology decisions. Whether the investment involves modernizing a mainframe environment, optimizing workloads, or deploying new enterprise...
This week at Planet Mainframe Trivia we’re dipping back into the deep history of computing with a quiz on the work of John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert—two of the most influential pioneers in the history of computing. Their work helped move electronic computers from...
While most people you know probably haven’t even heard of CICS, anyone that banks, travels, or does business in the modern world has benefited from this cornerstone of enterprise transaction processing. Evolving alongside changes in hardware, operating systems,...
When Microsoft Windows emerged in the 1980s, it represented a very different vision of computing from the centralized, highly structured world of the mainframe. Windows powered the rise of personal computers and client-server systems, while mainframes continued...
Like so many transformative innovations, the creation of UNIX was the unintentional outcome of a failed experiment—specifically with a time-sharing operating system called Multics for the GE-645 mainframe. While it was originally developed as a side project with...
Our quiz today focuses on Linux, which Linus Torvalds originally created in the early 90s for x86 desktop hardware—about as far from a mainframe as you can get. But its life on mainframes has proved remarkably powerful. Through the mid-to-late 90s, Linux gradually...
For the month of April, Planet Mainframe puts the spotlight on influential mainframers, and this week our trivia quiz is all about mainframe trailblazer Eleanor Kolchin. Kolchin built her career at a pivotal moment in computing, when computing machines were...
