Proven and widely available, mainframe leaders can take advantage of modern developer productivity tools, ones often used by distributed/cloud colleagues for AppDev and DevOps optimization. The question, though, is which ones offer the greatest value? Tools and...
By Tim Leader With its unrivalled stability, security and power the mainframe has long offered enormous benefits to the global business community. But as well as this, resilience and business continuation are other major benefits the platform provides. The...
Modernizing IMS applications sometimes means rewriting entire COBOL or PL/I programs in Java™. But another popular approach is to use Java when adding or modifying subroutines in existing PL/I applications. We can do this because IMS supports PL/I to...
I have spent my career in the mainframe computing space. It's a strange and insular world. And it's shrinking a little each day, as the global mainframe workforce sees skilled workers retiring, transitioning to other roles, sometimes even dying, without a...
The first two parts of this article: The Mainframe Lives and Thrives – Part 1 The Mainframe Lives and Thrives – Part 2 The conclusion of many papers, often quoting CIOs, is that lack of mainframe talent is threatening to damage their business and that there is no...
The IBM Enterprise COBOL for z/OS Migration Assistant (CMA) has been very popular among COBOL migration users. It is a step-by-step wizard and an interactive checklist that guide users through the information along their migration journey from COBOL 4 or earlier to...
Let me start by telling you a story… Once there was a big town and everyone went to school and learned to read and write and they bought and shared books. They liked reading. Then, some of the townspeople decided that it would be beneficial for everyone if the town...
Have you seen the recent headlines? Wanted urgently: People who know a half century-old computer language so states can process unemployment claims (CNN 04/08/2020) and An Ancient Computer Language Is Slowing America’s Giant Stimulus (Bloomberg 04/13/2020). These...
What can I say? I'm an old guy and I like old stuff. The best example of this is my 1968 Oldsmobile Cutlass convertible. I bought it about 10 years ago, a little bit before my 50th birthday. I've had older cars before - in my 30's I had a beautiful 1968 Camaro - that...
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 It’s not out-of-date – though programs written in it 60 years ago require very little updating to continue working today.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...
