Mainframe Techies Are A Dying Breed

Employers' fault... by darken9999 · 2003-05-21 05:54 · Score: 5, Insightful

Maybe if employers wouldn't require every employee to have such mass amounts of experience, there would be a few younger admins around. You know, almost like a junior admin... "Well, he knows how to admin a system, so we can teach him the specifics."

I think being a mainframe admin would be a blast (maybe I just don't know better), but in my eight years of sysadmin work, I've never touched a mainframe. Every job posting I recall coming across required previous experience.

Re:Employers' fault... by TCaptain · 2003-05-21 05:57 · Score: 5, Informative

Agreed, another major problem is that for many mainframe sysadmin type situation, that stuff just isn't taught in school anymore.

Our program mainly focused on C, C++ and assembler, with a smattering of COBOL and RPG. I spent the first few months learning this stuff when I got hired. Where I am now, we've just spent months interviewing people for junior positions and none of them even had THOSE basics.

--
"I'm not a procrastinator, I'm temporally challenged"
Re:Employers' fault... by StandardDeviant · 2003-05-21 06:07 · Score: 5, Interesting

Exactly. It's also very much a chicken-and-egg problem to get into the mainframe world, becuase the barriers to entry are much higher from the standpoint of working on the technologies at home to get that all-important First Job. It's easy to build a $500 linux server or buy a $1000 used ultrasparc sun machine to learn some unix and unix coding on, but ... how are you going to learn mainframe stuff? Half of that stuff isn't even documented in the trade press (unless O'Reilly has come out with Mainframe Crap in a Nutshell or something and I just haven't noticed... heck, even the acronym set for that skill area is completely divergent from what most of the rest of the tech world uses. DASD anyone? IPL? MVS? JCL? RPG? OPA? XYZ?) The closest I've ever seen to being able to toy with that sort of thing at home would be something like Hercules or buying a used AS/400 off ebay for a few grand (which isn't a mainframe but a lot closer than a generibox linux server ;))

And even with trying to learn it at home, the production machines cost so much and are usually so business critical, you're going to have to really luck out to find a position where you'll ever even be allowed to touch the thing... On the flip side, I guess once you're in that world your job would be pretty stable, simply by virtue of the same barriers to entry in the field.

--

News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Re:Employers' fault... by Xzzy · 2003-05-21 06:27 · Score: 4, Insightful

> Every job posting I recall coming across required
> previous experience.

Takes a long time, but it will become a self-resolving problem. The existing "old guard" will eventually die out (either literally or via retirement) and create a demand in the market.

This will either cause companies to lower their standards or discard the old mainframes.

It would make good business sense to address the problem before it reaches critical mass (ie, so much of the old guard is gone that there's no way to train newbies), but if the Y2K problem was any indication, foresight isn't a prerequisite for running a business.
Re:Employers' fault... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 06:28 · Score: 5, Informative

Even when they did teach such things, it wasn't called "Mainframe SysAdmin". You mainly went to school for programming. If you wanted to go the "Systems Programmer" route, you usually started out as an operator (mounting tapes for backups, printing, managing queues), then moved your way into systems programming. Every place I ever worked at never referred to any position as "Mainframe sysadmin". The typical mainframe system is just to big/complex. While mainframe ideology has filtered it's way down to smaller machines, I frankly get tired of people thinking you can be a "sysadmin" for a mainframe. Sorry if I come off as a mainframe bigot, but that's where I started. Yes, I'm in my 40s (with a good 25 years more work ahead of me).
Re:Employers' fault... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 06:35 · Score: 0

Maybe it's just stupid old me, but ALL the programmer want ads I ever saw (in newspapers, of course - I'm not a professional programmer) for any type of language set requires tons (okay, that's hyperbolic) of prior experience. If I had a company, I'd be worried about the appearance of desperation, or conversely, desire for personel redundancy, in my personel ads. So it doesn't surprise me one bit. But I'm stupid.
Re:Employers' fault... by Eskarel · 2003-05-21 06:37 · Score: 4, Insightful

Well I would agree with the fact that it's the employers fault, but disagree on what it is thay are doing which causes it.
I would of course agree with the frustration tech workers seeking employment right out of college, and workers in general for that matter. It's hard to get experience when everyone wants it to give you a job, but that's not really the problem when it comes to network and sysadmin positions.
It's perfectly sensible to require people who run something as complicated as a mainframe, or even network administration, or a half a dozen other things require strong experience. However if these companies want to have people available to work on these systems in the future they also have to provide opportunities for people to gain this experience without having to rely on them for full administration. That is to say companies should be hiring more PFY's so that they can train the next generation of administrators through real life experience.
Employers don't want to do this of course because it involves having an extra employee, but they would be much better off in the long term if they had people who had real experience.
Of course an additional problem with this sort of thing is unrealistic pay expectations among tech workers in general. No one is going to hire a PFY for 60,000 a year, but there are still many people on slashdot who believe that 50,000 is a ridiculously low salary for a full time job. So while a lot of it is employers being cheap, it's also somewhat us being unrealistic.
Re:Employers' fault... by CaptnMArk · 2003-05-21 06:49 · Score: 1

>DASD anyone? IPL?

Anyone who used OS/2 would know these two and many others.
Re:Employers' fault... by jedidiah · 2003-05-21 07:06 · Score: 1

However, employers also tend to require a 4 year degree for such positions. It costs quite a bit of money to get such a degree. That cost has to be recoverable by the graduate in order for that effort to be worthwhile.

Otherwise, no one able to afford the process will be interested in the work.

--
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Re:Employers' fault... by captain_craptacular · 2003-05-21 07:11 · Score: 3, Insightful

What school did you go to? I graduated 2 years ago and it was ALL about C/C++ and there was a required class in assembler (MIPS).

I was under the (possibly mistaken) impression that most CS schools were harping on C/C++ because if you knew them, you could learn almost any language quickly because >50% of them are based on C, use C syntax, use C++ object constructs, etc...

--
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security
Re:Employers' fault... by Vlad_the_Inhaler · 2003-05-21 07:18 · Score: 3, Informative

I consider myself to be a mainframe SysAdmin :-)

I started of programming them in Cobol, Fortran and Assembler and then gravitated to the systems-side of things. I first took over a site back in the late 80's (with around 10 years of experience back then) which tells you my age.

It is a lot of work, keeping on top of developments but it is possible.

--
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Re:Employers' fault... by LePrince · 2003-05-21 07:59 · Score: 5, Funny

Hire me ! I have plenty of experience with RPG. I finished Final Fantasy 1 to 3, 7 to 10, and I promise I'll do my best while working for you to finish the new releases on time. I also have good experience with Secret of Mana, Breath of Fire, 7th Saga, Zelda, and many others...
Oh, not THAT kind of RPG... ;-)
Re:Employers' fault... by riffraff · 2003-05-21 08:07 · Score: 1

My first foray into the professional world (after high school) was as a mainframe operator in the air force. I worked on Unisys 1100/60, 2200/400, and 2200/600, along with Perkin-Elmer 3240 (AFAMPE). It was just ops. Sysadmin really didn't exist as such, as you said. There were admins for individual subsystems, BQ (some finance), AC (more finance), VK (more finance), a bunch of stuff.
Re:Employers' fault... by eatdave13 · 2003-05-21 08:19 · Score: 1

Where are you at? I've got 3 years experience as a programmer/analyst on SYS/36s and AS/400s and am stuck in a crappy tech support job. I'd love to get back into programming, but there's nothing around here.

--
"Verbing weirds language." -- Calvin
Re:Employers' fault... by Surak · 2003-05-21 08:28 · Score: 1

I know a few, but I'm no mainframe programmer:

DASD = Direct Access Storage Device - fancy word for hard drive
IPL = forget what this stands for but it's basically a current instruction pointer or something isn't it?
MVS = IBM Mainframe OS don't know what it stands for
JCL = Job Control Language - basically for running batch jobs
RPG = Report Program Generator - language for getting reports out of databases
OPA and XYZ I have no idea ... I can make up some funny stuff if you like (Other People Asses, eXtra Yogurt Zaniness)

Some I have experience with RPG (I had a high school teacher who made me learn RPG II, he thought it would be a good idea for some reason I still can't figure out.... ). DASD (IBM used this term to refer to hard drives in its PS/2 line), MVS (I had a friend who was an OS/MVS programmer for AAA of Michigan), JCL (had some limited experience with this on an AS/400 [which is decidedly not a mainframe] once -- I personally find the language distasteful), the others, I dunno...picked 'em up from somehwere.

--
My journal has hot /. gossip.
Re:Employers' fault... by sql*kitten · 2003-05-21 08:45 · Score: 1, Insightful

Exactly. It's also very much a chicken-and-egg problem to get into the mainframe world, becuase the barriers to entry are much higher from the standpoint of working on the technologies at home to get that all-important First Job. It's easy to build a $500 linux server or buy a $1000 used ultrasparc sun machine to learn some unix and unix coding on, but ... how are you going to learn mainframe stuff?

In this economy? IBM can hoover up entire graduating classes with the promise of steady jobs then send them to Mainframe School. What're you gonna do, sit round for 6 months, 12 months, longer, working in Starbucks and waiting for a hot dotcom job, or go work for Big Blue with its health and dental and matching 401k and bottomless pockets? It's really not the problem the scaremongers are saying it is. Any of the big systems integrators - Accenture, CSC, EDS, Unisys - could do it, and they will, as soon as it's necessary to their businesses.
Re:Employers' fault... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 08:47 · Score: 0

I have to say that while micros and cheap LANs did bring down how much it would cost to an educational institution to set up computing facilities and related training labs, it did have the adverse effect of taking newcomers in the field of IT away from mainframes and concepts of batch processing.

I'm not saying everyone should go back exclusively to batch and punched-cards (though it would teach a few good typing skills and "the art of paying attention"), but in Real Life (tm) not everything is interactive. There is a lot of batch processing occuring out there (overnight jobs to update monster databases are a good example of this) and yet too many new graduates can't even wrap their brains around this.

Not only this, but their knowledge of computing architectures is so micro-centric that they judge everything with the same criterias you'd use for micros. They just don't believe you that, say, a Sparc running at half the speed of their "killer micro" will still eat their intel-based toy for breakfast and that a mainframe running at an (apparently) even lower clip will mop the floor with said micro, all because the way they're designed and built. Raw power cannot be measured in just the MHz of the CPU (I know, stating the obvious, but some still don't get it).

I do think that a lot of current training programs should be revised to include a strong mainframe component. Not just to keep Big Iron alive, but also to remove a few "techno-blinders"...
Re:Employers' fault... by blincoln · 2003-05-21 08:47 · Score: 2, Informative

IPL = forget what this stands for but it's basically a current instruction pointer or something isn't it?

Initial Program Load. The mainframe guys I've worked with have told me it's basically a reboot.

--
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Re:Employers' fault... by Jay+Maynard · 2003-05-21 09:01 · Score: 2, Informative

MVS = IBM Mainframe OS don't know what it stands for

Multiple Virtual Storage. There's a conceptual overview from the Unix geek viewpoint in ESR's upcoming book, The Art of Unix Programming .

--
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Re:Employers' fault... by EnderWiggnz · 2003-05-21 09:41 · Score: 1

tell that to social workers.

really, a 30-35k/year job w/bennies, right out of school is a damn good job - in just about any field, including real engineering.

and 50k+ is also a damn good salary, and should never be sneezed at.

--
... hi bingo ...
Re:Employers' fault... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 10:18 · Score: 0

I'll take a top-speed Intel over a top-speed Sparc in a box costing up to $10K more any day of the week:

Intel D875PBZ motherboard
(3.0 GHz, Pentium 4)
Spec2000Int Peak: 1200

Sun Blade 2000
(1.2GHz Ultrasparc III Cu)
Spec2000Int Peak: 722
Re:Employers' fault... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 11:03 · Score: 0

try mainframe express, emulates as/400 w/db2, it's what we use for learning cobol for the mainframe here in school
Re:Employers' fault... by Fesh · 2003-05-21 13:24 · Score: 1

Let's just say I'm somewhere between those figures, 3 years experience and lead developer on a project. Batchelor's in CS. Living in the U.S. and a born citizen. With H1Bs in my group pulling 20K more than me. Putting up with some really ridiculous shit because management wants to play money games while the codebase is in real danger of catastrophic collapse because they keep bolting more stuff on top of a piece of shit that got slapped together by a bunch of monkeys and then thrown at me. Yeah, I'm reaaaal happy.

Glad I was born into a lower-middle class family and am of a pragmatic bent or I'd really be pitching a hissy fit.

Tell me to find another job. I dare ya.

--
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
Re:Employers' fault... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 13:49 · Score: 0

"There are still many people on slashdot who believe that 50,000 is a ridiculously low salary for a full time job."

I don't know if it's so much that, as the fact that in many places, that 50,000 after first becoming $35,000 or less after taxes, becomes 16,000 after paying the housing costs for a not-very-nice home or apartment, and maybe, if you are very frugal, ends up as $4000 in savings at the end of the year.

People want to be able to buy a nice car, a relatively spacious home in a safe neighborhood, and they'd also enjoy having enough headroom to save enough to weather a recession. Lots of people would like to consider that a *minimum*.

There may be places where the same $50,000 might
give you a comfortable living with some extras and room to save, but, not everybody lives there, and I bet it's tough to find jobs there too.
Re:Employers' fault... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 13:55 · Score: 0

"Try living in the NYC metro area (USA) and then tell me that $50k/yr isn't a pittance."

I wouldn't dream of it. I'd be working as hard as possible to get as far away from there as I could.

There still aren't enough people who are affected that you see widespread peasant rebellions. I mean, you say you feel like a pauper, but, you and the rest of the masses are still inhibited from destroying the system out of sheer frustration. Quite the contrary. You are motivated enough to live "paycheck to paycheck" even though you could probably take ONE of those paychecks and buy a farm in Belize or something...
Re:Employers' fault... by screenrc · 2003-05-21 14:58 · Score: 1

Lets consider, how much are you making? If you
are making more than 50k, then according to
you your salary is unrealistic and ridiculously
low.

(By the way, as perhaps you know, even the doorman nowdays is making
50k per year.)
Re:Employers' fault... by buck_wild · 2003-05-21 15:13 · Score: 1

You nailed it. Same thing as a 'boot strap'.

--
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Re:Employers' fault... by aphor · 2003-05-21 16:20 · Score: 1

The real problem is that nobody who is eligible to be an entry level code monkey or Unix (what you dinosaur operators call "Open Systems") admin would accept the salary of an entry-level mainframe operator (scratch-tape jockey). Mainframes are multimillion dollar beasts who demand cadres of supplicants to feed it tapes and pinfeed paper. Smaller systems aren't as imposing on the people that come into contact with them. On the balance sheet, people are more important (paid) than the capital expense of the machine. The problem, IMHO, is one of accounting versus the human factor.

BTW: to reveal my bias, I am a Solaris admin (and a good one). I had the chance to take on a big Amdahl running VM with TPS and MVS(OS390) and I thought.. there is no grep on a mainframe. Simple little grep which validates the idea of stdin and stdout and the simple filter pipeline model of ad-hoc data processing (ad-hoc RE compiling JIT!!.. so NICE). It makes me very powerful. Mainframes could make me productive, but Unix makes me powerful. The idea that there is a creative alternative to compete with "throw hardware at it" problem solving... I know C, but I found COBOL to be kind of semantically nasty. That much will always come down to the Holy Wars(JARGON reference).

--
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
Re:Employers' fault... by BrokenHalo · 2003-05-21 16:36 · Score: 3, Funny

Mainframe Techies Are A Dying Breed
I'm not quite dead, you insensitive clod :-)
Re:Employers' fault... by ces · 2003-05-21 16:50 · Score: 1

Tell me to find another job. I dare ya.

Um, find another job and quit?

If things really are as bad as you claim they are it is only a matter of time before it blows up in a way that's not going to be pretty for anyone inside the blast radius.

Worst case if management is clueless across the board is the company will go into a death spiral. Even if it is only your department or division fixing the problem will often result in all of the current employees losing their jobs.

Also its best to learn what average salaries are in your area for your level of experience and job classification. Unless it is otherwise a dream job or you are desperate don't take much less than the average salary. Anyone who can't or won't pay what you are worth is likely to screw you in any number of other ways.

--
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
Re:Employers' fault... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 18:07 · Score: 0

over at UMD College Park, you gotta do C/C++, Java, Perl, Lisp (those profs at UMCP love Lisp), MIPS, and depending on the prof, some random language like python or something.
Re:Employers' fault... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 18:22 · Score: 0

You are grossly mismanaging your money if you can only save 4000 of 50000 per year.

The first rule of getting rich is "pay yourself first". Max out your 401K, max out your IRA, particiapate in drips.

If you rent, buy. I pay roughly $700/mo in mortgage and insurance. It would cost me $1200 or more to rent this place.

Remember-- mortgages are investment.

Nice cars, and spacious homes are for idiots. If you have to think about money, you can't afford them. Save money *first*.

There's a Japanese movie called something like "A taxing woman" about a tax investigator. At the end of the movie, as they are carting out bullion and jewels and art from a vault in a tax cheat's house, the head inspector asks him how he accumulated so much wealth.

The cheat replied with something like "becoming rich is like watching a glass of water fill up drop by drop. You are very thirsty, but you do not drink. One day, the glass is full, and a drop dribbles down the side. Then-- you lick the glass."

Getting rich quick is hard. Getting rich slowly is easy.
Re:Employers' fault... by WWWWolf · 2003-05-21 22:18 · Score: 1

I have plenty of experience with RPG. I finished Final Fantasy...

...but not Ultima? And you haven't even finished Nethack? Sorry, every work place that is hiring RPG experts has looong queues of people far more competent than you... =)
- W4, still working furiously on that Nethack thing
Re:Employers' fault... by Fesh · 2003-05-21 22:24 · Score: 1

Sadly, it already did go into a death spiral once. Then it got bought by an upstart called Worldcom (you may have heard of them), who got a little creative about dealing with the situation... And now the same fucktards are back at the helm for another go. Cute, huh?

Yes, I need out bad. I'm being set up for failure. My point is, with all the discussion in this article about the job market, I'm in a state of techno-slavery. I'd love to have the satisfaction of storming out, but that won't pay off my student loans... Finally, with all the job postings I see requiring years of experience in the newest technologies (which I haven't been allowed to apply to my work which means I have zero), it's pretty clear that most places aren't any more clueful, and I'd rather not jump out of the frying pan to fall face-first into the coals.

What I need is out of IT. I need to be developing a product, not providing an unappreciated in-house service where everyone wants something done and but wants someone else to pay for the development work. I'm open to suggestions, I'm just feeling rather powerless about the whole thing at the moment.

--
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
Re:Employers' fault... by Fallen_Knight · 2003-05-21 22:47 · Score: 1

No me! i have much experiance with the other kind of RPGs. Heavy training in duke3d, doom1,2 (and soon 3!), all unreals, quake, just to name a few, refrences to my 1337 skillz can be obtained upon request! Request the model from doom, the classics are the best.

Or is there ANOTHER kind of RPG i'm not aware of....???
Re:Employers' fault... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 23:38 · Score: 0

Try Australia, plenty of unemployed mainframe sysprogs downunder. Like MS, mainframe skills become stale in a year or 2, but downunder, noone want to pickup the tab for training.

The standards drop has already happened - do it now/do it over overrides the olde do-it-right. Housekeeping duties neglected. More money doing screen-scraping. When will they lean >600 MS servers means at least 1 server a day down, whereas Mainframe needs 4 hours scheduled downtime a month typically- but glitch free the rest of the time

The most employable learn to adapt - and take the slap dash happy MS admin approach - bunging on that service pack without testing, and meeting that rollout date, with an untested image straight from development.

So any smart mainframer is switching to SQL, where mere DB jocks get paid much more.
Re:Employers' fault... by ces · 2003-05-22 01:20 · Score: 1

For what its worth IT management at telecom firms seems to be made up entirely of fucktards. The only ones who seem to have any fun are the router jockeys or those working at pure-play ISPs.

AT&T wireless services seemed to have clueful people in their IT department for a while but the fucktards have taken over there as well. Everyone I know who works at a telco or at a place where former telco managers have landed does nothing but complain about the cluelessness of the executives. For some reason anyone who's been in management at a telco seems to become endowed with a reverse midas touch.

If you are going to do in-house service find a company like a bank that doesn't fuck with the IT staff much or a company on the way up where IT is an essential component of the supply chain like Wal-mart or Costco. Universities, government, or research labs are also an option. One of the happiest IT people I know works for NOAA.

The problem with working in new product development is there are proportionaly less jobs out there and the jobs are much harder to get if you don't have embedded systems, OS kernel, or bleeding edge technology experience.

You may want to check out some contract shops as well. Its a good way to make top-dollar without having to get mired in the BS. Even if you have to work on broken-by-design systems at least you are well paid.

I'm not sure what part of the country you are in right now but it may be worth checking out other areas. Depending on your skills and interest you may find better pay and opportunities in another part of the country.

BTW if your skillset matches a job posting fairly closely except for experience consider applying anyway. A lot of times the minimum experience or degree requirements are BS. A friend of mine just got a job where she had only 1 year of experience in the key skill area where they had wanted 5 and no college degree even though they stated it was a requirement.

Another important thing to do is to take advantage of any contacts you may have. Most of my tech industry jobs I've gotten via contacts. For the two I didn't get this way only one was via sending a resume cold, the other one I was recruited via a resume I'd posted to the net.

--
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
Re:Employers' fault... by cathouse · 2003-05-22 02:03 · Score: 1

and while were at it lets not forget IOCS [pronounced eye'-ox]

--
Thelma, I'm not making ANY deals.
Re:Employers' fault... by cathouse · 2003-05-22 02:37 · Score: 1

It would seem obvious that the young Gentleman fails to realize that he should be looking under the heading:
COMPUTER OP-GRAVEYARD
benefits after 6 mo
must know SPS 1401/40,
360 Asmbly, COBOL,FORTRAN
min wage apply rear of loading
dock after 2AM

--
Thelma, I'm not making ANY deals.
Re:Employers' fault... by sjames · 2003-05-22 04:38 · Score: 1

I'll take a top-speed Intel over a top-speed Sparc in a box costing up to $10K more any day of the week:

Since you're probably using it for a typical desktop system, that's a good idea. The larger machines are not about single threaded computational ability, they're about BIG I/O, and many thousands of proceses all running at a decent speed. It's a poor fit for the desktop, but can be just what's needed in a datacenter environment.

Another factor is unscheduled downtime. No big deal for a desktop, so not worth paying big bucks for, but when downtime casts in the >$1000/second range, a MTBF estimated at 70 years is a good thing!
Re:Employers' fault... by snoitpo · 2003-05-22 04:39 · Score: 1

MVS stands for "Man Verses System". Plus, today it's spelled "z/OS".

Last time I heard, IEFBR14 had at least 6 APARS against it. When you consider it's a utility that's over 35 years old, I guess someone would find a few problems with it. (One was that the return code wasn't set, another was a system debugger couldn't handle objects less than 16 bytes in size, a few other debugger bugs.)
Re:Employers' fault... by sjames · 2003-05-22 04:54 · Score: 1

There's a combination of isues that prevent younger people from the mainframe.

Companies have gotten used to small training budgets due to people learning on $500 machines at home/school before even attempting to enter the workforce. That's fine for Unix servers, but won't scale to the mainframe at all.

Meanwhile, the basic requirements for entry level to the mainframe also look very similar to much better paying jobs with servers, so that's where they go for work. If employers want to start young entry level employees out swapping tapes, they're going to need to recruit high school seniors and either provide education in systems programming or offer work/study programs and tuition. The alternative is to pay entry level people what they can get for working on small servers elsewhere and hire semi-skilled labor to jockey the tapes.

In summary, the problem is that their entry level offerings and requirements were a good deal for people 20 years ago when programming PCs didn't look like a career option and every graduate had worked with a mainframe, but now a new graduate can get a much better deal elsewhere.
Re:Employers' fault... by sjames · 2003-05-22 05:03 · Score: 1

Of course an additional problem with this sort of thing is unrealistic pay expectations among tech workers in general. No one is going to hire a PFY for 60,000 a year, but there are still many people on slashdot who believe that 50,000 is a ridiculously low salary for a full time job. So while a lot of it is employers being cheap, it's also somewhat us being unrealistic.

It's only unrealistic if they can't actually get that somewhere else with the same skill set. If that's the case, the problem will self correct as these people get tired of being perminantly unemployed. If it's not the case (they can and are getting work), then it's a simple matter of economics, offer more or do without.
Re:Employers' fault... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-22 05:35 · Score: 0

Ah, that unsecheduled downtime, like what happens when you forget to put ECC on your cpu's cache? Kind of like what Sun was doing until a two years ago? Sure sucked for companies like ebay and the others that had to sign NDA's prohibiting them from talking about the lack of ECC in order to get a patch to disable cache use (and take a big perf hit as a result, better than random unscheduled downtime though).

Like the article says, ECC on cache has been a standard part of Intel CPUs forever (well, in computer years at least). Sun blew it by not doing the same, and double blew it by by being so evasive about it for years before finally publically answering up for it.

Fundamentally, it ain't about the CPU, it is about the infrastructure and there is nothing technically stopping a company from dropping an x86 chip into mainframe-class infrastructure and getting mainframe-class reliability and performance. Intel would rather you do it with an Itanic, but their 2MB cache Xeons and of course AMD's Opteron are perfect candidates for such a job. It doesn't hurt that they are also tops in computation and bandwidth.
Re:Employers' fault... by sciencewhiz · 2003-05-22 05:52 · Score: 1

But CS schools aren't training people to program for mainframes. That is the point of this article. COBOL is not related at all to C/C++
Re:Employers' fault... by jedidiah · 2003-05-22 08:49 · Score: 1

30K puts you at the level of a tradesman.

Add ~ 7K in student load debt overhead and your at the level of an inexperienced tradesman.

--
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Re:Employers' fault... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-22 11:25 · Score: 0

actually, you COULD buy an as/400 off ebay. and be quite well set.. its nearly identical, many of the same concepts, principals, and techniques are used. os/400 and os/390 are variants of mvs. RPG and JCL are both native. besides, youll find waaaaaaaay more s/390's in production today (technically a mid-frame) than anything else. so if you bought one of those, and a couple books.. you could get a start. i saw a used 9406 on ebay today for $450. small system, but same OS.
Re:Employers' fault... by Tony-A · 2003-05-22 14:02 · Score: 1

IEFBR14 is, conceptually at least, a 2-byte program consisting of just BR 14. It is called and then just returns. It's like Hello World, but without the IO.
6 APARs on IEFBR14 does lend a lot of credence to "No such thing as a completely debugged program."
Re:Employers' fault... by EnderWiggnz · 2003-05-22 15:44 · Score: 1

30k at the age of 22 with full benefits is a damn good job.

christ, at 22, at any halfway decent run company, you'll get a shot at a junior engineer, or in the IT App-Dev world, programmer trainee.

Even if you graduated from the top of your class at a major Tech school, you arent coming in as a senior eng/programmer/analyst.

and those junior jobs pay... 30-40k. with benefits.

--
... hi bingo ...
Re:Employers' fault... by sjames · 2003-05-22 15:49 · Score: 1

Ah, that unsecheduled downtime, like what happens when you forget to put ECC on your cpu's cache?

That very same unscheduled downtime :-) Interesting article, thanks for the link.

With mainframes, it's not really the CPU itself that makes the difference. It's things like the need to fully virtualize and probably emulate everything. For example, the AS/400 (ok, so thats a mini) has emulated since day 1. The 'machine language' the user saw was a VM's bytecodes. Since the first 400s came out, they've switched from a CISC processor to RISC, but as far as the user (or OS) sees, it's exactly the same machine language.

ANYTHING can be hot swapped on a mainframe. Failure prediction is all through the systems.

Itanic and Opteron have potential in that space,m but they're still a long way away from meeting the requirements.
Re:Employers' fault... by jedidiah · 2003-05-23 05:42 · Score: 1

Certainly, most positions that require a college degree tend to have better growth potential.

However, there are non-college jobs that allow one to quickly surpass your 30K "damn good job" benchmark. Such jobs do not require one to spend 10k-100k just to get in the door.

That 10k-100k expenditure can easly make that 30k "damn good job" seem more like a junior position at Burger King.

Tuition inflates faster than anything else in our economy. This will only worsen as the States suffer through their budget crises. At this point, there is even talk about access to higher education in the US rolling back to pre-WWII levels.

Some state schools are already too expensive to pay for with Stafford loans alone.

Also, 30K was supposed to be the average (midwest) starting salary for CIS 15 years ago. Inflation hasn't stopped occuring since then.

--
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Re:Employers' fault... by RStar23 · 2003-05-23 10:03 · Score: 1

DASD - direct access storage device; used to refer to disk storage (such as 3350's, etc.) Has been in use since the early System 360 days. IPL - initial program load, "booting" a mainframe operating system. MVS - once upon a time, the flagship IBM mainframe operating system in the business world; quite powerful, quite large and a pain in the butt at times. JCL - job control language; used to control batch processing. comes in many flavors depending upon the OS you are working with. RPG - report program generator here's a couple more oldies but goodies: VM - virtual machine operating system - my personal favorite IBM OS. Dates back to pre-PC, pre-Unix dates. CICS - this is what we used for online access by users. Hope this helps from one of those 'dying breed' they are talking about

A question... by zutroy · 2003-05-21 05:57 · Score: 3, Funny

What the hell is a "mainframe"?

Re:A question... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 06:02 · Score: 0

>What the hell is a "mainframe"?

http://www.mainframe.ca/
Re:A question... by phorm · 2003-05-21 06:03 · Score: 3, Funny

Joke or serious question?

A very large "computer" (some are more comparable nowadays to an advanced calculator) to which remote terminals connect in order to function. In short, big ugly was-once-super-powerful computer that is the master of a network or portion thereof.

Look for something like a big box with lots of wires, maybe some tapes attached, a little rust on the side, and a weeping IT admin beside it.
Re:A question... by zutroy · 2003-05-21 06:05 · Score: 1

Joke. But thanks anyway.
Re:A question... by number6x · 2003-05-21 06:41 · Score: 5, Funny

According to the Devil's IT Dictionary:
mainframe n. An obsolete device still used by thousands of obsolete companies serving billions of obsolete customers and making huge obsolete profits for their obsolete shareholders. And this year's run twice as fast as last year's.
pretty accurate.
Re:A question... by tricker · 2003-05-21 06:49 · Score: 1

it is frame #1 in a flash movie.

> What the hell is a "mainframe"?
Re:A question... by pauls2272 · 2003-05-21 07:05 · Score: 5, Informative

Good Question. The mainframe where I work is the SMALLEST piece of equipment on the machine room floor. The most space is taken up by huge racks of NT servers. The next most by a huge RS6000 complex. The mainframe is dwarfed by comparision. The biggest difference between a mainframe and a midrange box is IO. The mainframe IO is much different from PCI or SCSI that midranges use. On current mainframes, you can move 24 gig into or out of central memory every second (this is doubling in the next generation mainframe - the Z990). Try that on a RS6000.
Re:A question... by dogfart · 2003-05-21 07:37 · Score: 1

A micro computer is one that you can pick up and carry.
A mini computer is too heavy to carry, but small enough you can get your arms around it.
A mainframe is too heavy to carry and too large to get your arms around.

--
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
Re:A question... by Obiwan+Kenobi · 2003-05-21 09:08 · Score: 1

I swear to God this is true:

We had an old "mainframe" (shitty NT4 server) which ran COBOL code on it. Read about it here.

Well, one day Unisys comes in and offers to DOUBLE our current processing speed. We were using a dual pentium pro w/ 128 MB server.

And how were they planning on doubling the speed? By replacing the dongle on an LPT port on the back of the machine. They wanted tens of thousands to REPLACE A DONGLE. Evidently they throttle their own software in order to leech more cash off companies (banks in particular).

As I laughed and told them no, the look of surprise was priceless indeed...

Evidently this is standard practice...
Re:A question... by Big+Jason · 2003-05-21 10:34 · Score: 1

My "inferior" Sun Fire 15k can go up to 72* processors, 576GB of memory, and has up to 43.2 GB/sec sustained system bandwidth and 21.6 GB/sec of sustained I/O bandwidth. Best of all, it runs Solaris.

* Technically up to 106 procs, but you have to sacrifice I/O.
Re:A question... by fishbowl · 2003-05-21 14:06 · Score: 2, Informative

Hundreds of comments, and I got to yours before I saw anything that resembled a clue. Thank you for pointing out that IO is what a mainframe is all about, and that there's not really a comparison to the PC world.

--
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Re:A question... by sirwired · 2003-05-22 01:04 · Score: 1

Try, just try, to actually GET 21.6GB/s from your external busses with heavy-duty database workloads. SCSI is simply a watered-down version of the OEMI protocol that IBM developed in the late 60's. TCP/IP is no better.

With SCSI, the processor goes out and sends a command to the SCSI controller requesting some small amount of data. The controller sends the request to the target, and the data flows. When the command is complete, the controller will interrupt the processor that sent the request, and patiently wait for the next command. The OS then thrashes through the interrupt processing, and figures out what the next data request will be. This process is repeated until all the data has been retrieved.

With OEMI, and it's successors, ESCON and FICON, things are much different. The processor, produces a list of commands that will retrieve ALL the data necessary for the given operation. Then, a single assembly instruction starts the program. Next, a dedicated "channel processor" takes over. Every last data retrieval command is executed and only when the ENTIRE task is complete is the processor interrupted.

Interrupt processing is expensive, and the S/360, and its successors were built to minimize that. For compute-intensive applications, mainframes suck. If what you are doing is number-crunching, there are not so many interrupts, and it isn't a problem. If what you are doing is performing trivial tasks (like integer math, searching, sorting, etc.) on a crap-load of data, interrupts suck.

Each system has it's own strengths. There are some applications that work best on mainframes, and others that work best on UNIX boxen. That is just the way things are.

SirWired
Re:A question... by amorsen · 2003-05-22 05:00 · Score: 1

The low end is catching up. Try googling for I2O, for one thing. Interrupts are not a big problem anymore, peripherals switch to polling when under load. Remember, CPU power is cheap at the low end. Who cares if one or two processors do very little except managing the I/O when there are 30 more of them free to do actual work?
Mainframes sell because of the complete environment, with partitioning, hardware resilience, all that good stuff. There is nothing like creating a new virtual machine with a copy of the system, testing a new release, and then switching over. I am green with envy.
Oh and if someone needs loving care for their mainframe, I am certainly for hire... No experience with mainframes yet, but I can learn.

--
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Re:A question... by number6x · 2003-05-22 08:32 · Score: 1

Gee, I must be really old but there seem to be a lot of people who have no clue. A pc is not a mainframe. There are many computer architectures in the world, not just Apple and IBM clones. calling an NT box a mainframe is as appropriate as calling a VW bug a super tanker. They both move stuff from place to place and are mostly metal, but just about everything else about them is different.
I don't want to sound angry here, I guess I just take it for granted that people know that 'mainframe' means the giant big-iron business computers sold by IBM (and clones from Amdahl/Fujitsu). So its my fault for not recognizing something I take as obvious.
The computer Obiwan called a "maniframe" was not in any way, shape, or form a mainframe computer. Anything that ran NT was a microcomputer. This is about the smallest weakest class of computers (above apliances like PDA's and Cell phones and calculators).
The mainframe is near the top when it comes to computing horsepower. Super computers are the next step up.
I guess the 64-bit Alpha machines might be classed with their Vax brothers as 'minicomputers'. They could run NT 3.5x. The new IA-64 may be in this class if it is linked to a more powerfull motherboard architecture.
This link will take you to an IBM webpage that shows some of IBM's current mainframe hardware. MicroSoft has never written any commercial software that runs on these. The Z-series can process millions of records a second. The I/O throughput on these beasts is mindboggling. almost everthing in them has automatic fail-over and hot-swap ability, even the CPU's! They are not very good at floating point math. I have never seen a mainframe 'crash'.
Linux does run on these machines as an alternative to the native IBM Z/OS, or along side it. IBM has a version of its own UNIX, AIX that can run on these machines as well. Yes they can run multiple operating systems at the same time. Java and perl and many other open software programs have been ported to the various mainframe OS's.
Links like this say that about 75% of the program source code in the world is COBOL on mainframes. Some programs currently running where I work predate the founding of Microsoft and Apple! I wouldn't be suprised if there are programs running in a bank or a government agency somewhere that predates Bill Gates or Steve Wozniak.
Re:A question... by Obiwan+Kenobi · 2003-05-22 11:34 · Score: 1

Hey, I'm fully aware (did you see the linked post?) of that. I know it's not a mainframe, I passed out of Computers 101 like every other geek.

All I'm expressing is that they continued to call it that even though it really wasn't one. They might've worked with room-filling mainframes in the past, and simply decided to call every "Main Server" a mainframe.

Hell, they called the monitor/keyboard the "Spo" (rhymes with foe), because that's what the bosses called it Back In The Day.
Re:A question... by number6x · 2003-05-23 01:26 · Score: 1

My fault again, no offense intended. "Spo", that's before my time :)

Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by stratjakt · 2003-05-21 05:59 · Score: 5, Insightful

"55 per cent were over 50, compared with fewer than 10 per cent of those with Unix or Windows NT server skills." Cobol programers, still needed for legacy applications, are mostly in their 40s. Help is on the way, though, thanks to IBM's use of Linux, which "freshens the labor pool" according to the article."

How does linux freshen the mainframe labor pool, and not the Unix/Windows NT pool?

Linux ain't System/36 or MPE or any other mainframe OS. And show me one linux app that's written in COBOL. (The language exists, but I've never seen it put to use).

This is a self correcting problem. A good admin/coder can pick up mainframe stuff when he needs to. All the 50+ year olds are still working the jobs they got when they were 30. When they die off/retire, younger folks will pick it up.

I mean, hell, I picked up enough about MPE and FORTRAN and COBOL to do my job inside of a week. And I got competent with S/36 and RPG at my last job.

It aint rocket science. It's like a skilled machinist learning to shoe horses.

--
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!

Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by TopShelf · 2003-05-21 06:09 · Score: 5, Insightful

This more a symptom of employers concentrating on specific experience more than talented personnel. A fundamental skill that the vast majority of IS professionals have is the ability to LEARN and ADAPT. Unfortunately there's no buzzword that can signify this on a resume, so it gets ignored.

--
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by Elwood+P+Dowd · 2003-05-21 06:10 · Score: 4, Informative

And when they decide to pay those mainframe devs with real money, some of us kids might be a little more interested in learning. I know a few guys with a ton of mainframe experience... they keep getting shuffled between giant companies, with pay cuts every time. Screw that.

--

There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by bousozoku · 2003-05-21 06:17 · Score: 1

IBM System/36 has SSP as its operating system, not S/36, and it's hardly a mainframe--it's a mini computer. COBOL programmers are certainly out there and aging, but many of them made small fortunes during the Y2K craze, correcting the mistakes they originally coded. RPG/II and RPG/III programmers are in similar situations. Their operations counterparts are much better off. I would hope that the money of the world would not be trusted to anything else but these two languages (RPG and COBOL) since most programming languages only feature real/floating point numbers which innately have rounding errors. A banking system using C, C++, Objective-C, Java would be worthless outside the classroom as there's always a strong possibility that the numbers are all wrong.

--
folding@home is good for you
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by SquadBoy · 2003-05-21 06:20 · Score: 1

Well in the case of MPE it is dying and being replaced by HP-UX and if you know Linux you can get up to speed on HP-UX in short order. So at least in one market it does in fact refresh the labor pool. I'm thinking IBM is moving the same way away from whatever OS/Language they use and towards Linux. So yea this does in fact make sense

--

Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by Qzukk · 2003-05-21 06:24 · Score: 1

A good admin/coder can pick up mainframe stuff when he needs to.

Yeah, sure, I've got spare Big Iron laying around my basement, some day I'll fire it up and learn how to run it....

Yeah, right.

I'm sure I could pick it up in a flash. Too bad that employers don't want someone who can pick it up in a flash, they want someone with at least several years experience. Most of these positions I've seen in the local paper are for Senior Admin positions, where they want a lifetime of experience running these things.

Because of the economy, assistant admin positions are rare. Companies want to find one guy capable of doing the work, alone, so low-experience junior admins are a thing of the past. The old-school style of passing knowledge down from generation to generation is gone, since a new hire generally starts after the previous hire has retired/quit/been fired. (Been there, done that, the "documentation" typically left behind is usually pretty shoddy, since the author doesn't care... they're not working there anymore by the time it gets read)

--
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by Cyno · 2003-05-21 06:24 · Score: 1

The learning curve to become a mainframe expert from a linux expert is probably going to be a lot less than that of an NT admin. A lot of the concepts should be very similar.
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by ramzak2k · 2003-05-21 06:26 · Score: 1

"IBM's use of Linux, which "freshens the labor pool" according to the article"

I think what is implied is shift away from mainframes into Linux servers by IBM.
The later does have a lot of fresh blood.

--

Siggy Say, Siggy Do
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by XNormal · 2003-05-21 06:28 · Score: 1

How does linux freshen the mainframe labor pool, and not the Unix/Windows NT pool?

Linux on mainframe has a certain coolness factor to it. It could draw a younger workforce to mainframes that will learn the rest of mainframe lore on the way.

The effort in porting and maintaining linux on mainframes may be worth it for IBM just for this.

--
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by Thud457 · 2003-05-21 06:29 · Score: 2, Interesting

"This more a symptom of employers concentrating on specific experience more than talented personnel. A fundamental skill that the vast majority of IS professionals have is the ability to LEARN and ADAPT. Unfortunately there's no buzzword that can signify this on a resume, so it gets ignored."
Just goes to show why Management, Marketing and HR go to make up the axis of idiocy.
An engineer sees the problem of "we can't find experienced candidates" and comes up with the solution of "well, let's find some smart people and train them up".

--
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by g_goblin · 2003-05-21 06:32 · Score: 1

[shell] iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth1 -s slashdot.org -j UP_MY_ASS

[shell] Couldn't load target `UP_MY_ASS'':/usr/local/lib/iptables/libipt_UP_MY_ ASS.so
Try `iptables -h' or 'iptables --help' for more information.
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by Obiwan+Kenobi · 2003-05-21 06:44 · Score: 4, Interesting

And show me one linux app that's written in COBOL. (The language exists, but I've never seen it put to use).

I've worked in banks/credit unions my entire career, and this is my take.

In my experience, a LOT of financial software is written in COBOL.

I'm not talking about Quicken, I'm talking about the applications which take in hundreds of thousands of transactions in databases which boggle the mind.

I know for a fact that the core processing portion of ITI Software is written mainly in COBOL, as I ran the server there for over 4 years. I won't call it a mainframe (even though the superiors did) because the software package ran in Win2k Server using some really odd "MCP" (Master Control Program) stuff that is by far the most picky, strangely configured software I've ever come across. These "mainframes" were sold and configured by Unisys, who are definitely in bed with ITI as far as hardware/software support is concerned.

Most of the database per se is large "Flat Files", just a long stream of 0's and 1's and other data, seperated by special characters. During the daily processing of checks and various transactions, these files are updated, and it is these files which are utilized during daily operation.

It's a terribly arcane way of doing things, but if it ain't broke...

You'd also be surprised at the amount of robust win32 software that is written to interact with such dinosaur programming.

When I first encountered this system (where you have to enter process numbers and "AX" to send commands: for example "1234AX Y" to answer a y or n question a cobol program asks for) I thought they were kidding. Nope, this is how some banks actually process work, transactions, and reports/statements.

Also, any COBOL programmer made a FORTUNE with the whole Y2K thing. I know I specifically lost many days of my life in testing, especially with the federal government in utilizing their old DOS software (FEDLINE) and testing for year 2000 compliance.
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 06:56 · Score: 0

I did mainframe shit (CICS, COBOL, DB2, IMS, ASM, HACL...) for years, before moving on to Linux/Java/C++...

Mainframe (OS/390) rocked. It kicked serious butt without making a lot of it.

My current project/s involves setting up massive numbers of Linux servers inside old IBM mainframes, thus creating seriously stable server farms. We can get 100's of servers into an average VM machine. The oil and gas people love us.

I don't see any Xeon's on my horizon!
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by gillbates · 2003-05-21 07:10 · Score: 2, Interesting

This is a self correcting problem. A good admin/coder can pick up mainframe stuff when he needs to. All the 50+ year olds are still working the jobs they got when they were 30. When they die off/retire, younger folks will pick it up.
Obviously, you've never worked on a mainframe. It's not like Java or UNIX, where you can google the web and come up with useful documentation. You have to be trained to use a mainframe in a college environment; you can't learn it by picking up an O'Reilly book and cramming over the weekend. Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying you're stupid; it's just that IBM has gone to great lengths to ensure that the only documentation for mainframes is available through them, and their writers aren't exactly pulitzer winners, if you know what I mean. You simply can't pick up a book on the subject, or google the web, because no one is enthusiastic enough about mainframe programming to write the stuff down and publish it (either hardcopy or web.) It's kind of hard to learn something when there isn't any documentation.

And if you think otherwise, here's a challenge: Reply to this post with the JCL necessary to compile and run a COBOL program which will print out "HELLO WORLD". And then give the URL or a link to a book title where you found this information.

--
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 07:14 · Score: 0

One of the greatest truism I've read. I am equally comfortable in J2EE\JSP, VB\ASP, COBOL\CICS Coding is coding folks either you get it or you don't. But I have been denied jobs for not meeting the required 5 year minimum in language X or whatever. It is our logical thinking and problem solving skills that should be evaluated.
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by Fnord · 2003-05-21 07:39 · Score: 1

They're referring to the fact that IBM promoting running linux on its mainframes lately.
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by Valafar · 2003-05-21 07:44 · Score: 4, Informative

Here you go, smart ass (you really should know better than to put an obvious challenge up like that on /.)

Some Quick Finds from Google:

Your hello world:

http://www.roesler-ac.de/wolfram/hello.htm

And Another with MVS JCL:

http://www2.latech.edu/~acm/helloworld/asm370.html

And Some Miscellaneous Links for Main frame coding:

http://search390.techtarget.com/home/0,289692,sid1 0,00.html (Looks to be s/390 specific articles).

http://www.texasrock.com/ (Nice collection of links)

College is fine and dandy, but that's not the only way to learn something.
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 07:57 · Score: 0

I think you're right on here. I started as an NT admin, but when the boss said "We're getting a Sun server for our database back end and optical storage", I learned Solaris. When they said "Our Cisco guy is leaving, can you handle this?", I got up to speed on IOS. Part of the motivation for administrators is conquering new technologies.

On the downside, I've lost a some enthusiasm for Windows.
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by blibbleblobble · 2003-05-21 08:02 · Score: 1

"I won't call it a mainframe because the software package ran in Win2k Server using some really odd "MCP" (Master Control Program) stuff that is by far the most picky, strangely configured software I've ever come across."

Is it bad that we only know the Master Control Program as a Tron reference?
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by nharmon · 2003-05-21 08:13 · Score: 1

To bring this back on topic, how many young people do you have working on this system? The Unisys mainframe we have is only touched by the Unisys technician, and a handfull of "old guys" who've been doing so for many years.

I've been with the company for about 4 years, and wouldn't expect to touch the mainframe for another 10-15 years. And knowing what I know about IT turn-over rates, I see the chances of that happening being very low.
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by necrognome · 2003-05-21 08:17 · Score: 1

mod parent up pls. his first link is a nice survey of languages in use.

--

Let's get drunk and delete production data!
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by whoever57 · 2003-05-21 08:34 · Score: 1

I don't think you fully understood the question: it specifically required the *JCL* to run the program. I don't see that in the links you posted -- only the source code for the programs.

--
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by wik · 2003-05-21 08:35 · Score: 1

Having worked with the A-Series for almost 4 years, I agree that the hardware and software are very different from anything else you've seen.

There are plenty of other ways programmers could have chosen for you to interact with the application (e.g. intuitive, consistent, robust forms-mode menus). I actually long for a way of sending messages to programs in unix like I could on the A. Their facility is basically a set of generalized signals to tasks, with user-defined data tagged on the side (file not found? Tell it to find another use another filename, etc...).

The machine also handles exceptional conditions gracefully. For example, what happens to most unix programs when they run out of disk space? In my experience, most segfault, crash, or hit infinite loops. On the A, the MCP suspends the task, notifies the operator, and waits patiently for more disk.

--
/ \
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
x
/ \
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by conteXXt · 2003-05-21 08:39 · Score: 1

ok about Hello World?

That's COBOL, I think he said JCL (Job Control Language).

P.S The JCL would be longer than that program.

--
The truth about Led Zep should never be told on /. (Karma suicide ensues)
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 08:42 · Score: 0

A good admin/coder can pick up mainframe stuff when he needs to.

I'm afraid not. I started in mainframes, the first couple years mostly doing applications in cobol and assembler. When I moved over to systems, with 3-4 years of app work it was another three years before I was comfortable enough to fly solo as a systems programmer... But a few years later when I moved to unix (AIX) it was about two years until I felt ready to solo as an AIX administrator. There is some convergence going on, but IBM mainframes and unix boxes are entirely different breeds. The hardware subsystems are very compartmentalized on mainframes, particularly as for peripherals (hey, on mainframes the DISKS ARE PERIPHERALS) and the layout of the controllers and the paths from the mainframe to the controllers and then to the disks can be very important.

Similarly, you aren't really a systems programmer on a mainframe if you aren't comfortable with Assembler (BAL) -- and it's a year's working with it to get that level of comfort (Yeah you can learn it in a couple of six week evening classes, but as with every other language competance requires real world experience and exposure over time).

As others have said, mainframers aren't "dying", but an awful lot of us went other ways in the stagnation of the '90's. I'm making 60% more in AIX and Linux admin and programming plus a little occasional (still rare) moonlighting work than I ever made as a mainframer. And I haven't heard that salaries, not to mention future prospects, have improved all that much.

So, if anyone wants me back as a mainframe systems programmer, all they have to do is offer me enough money to be more than I'm making now plus my estimation of the future earnings risk of going back to the golden ghetto.... The man said "Follow the money!" I did. I'ts better here.

-- TWZ
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 08:51 · Score: 0

MPE has been dying longer than BSD has. Everytime HP tries to EOL it, their customers rise up and tell them to pound sand, and it gets another 10 year reprieve.

We deal with MPE in a big way here, our main product runs on it. It's been ported to NT, and we've toyed around with the idea of a unix port. But we've been hearing about MPE and the HP 3000s being EOL'ed for what seems like ages. We aren't writing it's eulogy yet.
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by Obiwan+Kenobi · 2003-05-21 08:54 · Score: 1

The machine also handles exceptional conditions gracefully. For example, what happens to most unix programs when they run out of disk space? In my experience, most segfault, crash, or hit infinite loops. On the A, the MCP suspends the task, notifies the operator, and waits patiently for more disk.

Yeah, that was a brilliant little bit there, and I actually hit that limit many times of my 4.5 years with the bank, when running monster reports/imports/extracts.

There are times when it was good, and times when it was awful. NX/View was a nice little proggie though, I liked it quite a bit. I don't know how much I uncovered over the years of the A series power, but a lot of it seemed damn impressive, for such an archaic layout/interface.

It's also nice to meet another A Series veteran here at /. Unisys mainframe vets unite! :)
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by ebh · 2003-05-21 08:56 · Score: 1

But they've held onto their red staplers...
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by gillbates · 2003-05-21 09:44 · Score: 1

Um, I'm still not seeing any JCL. Here's a hint: it will probably start like this:
//U890898 JOB , 'ACCT',REGION=2048K //STEP1 EXEC IGYWCG,CPARM='FLAG(I,I),APOST,TEST(STMT)'

So seeing as how you didn't post JCL, I'll give you partial credit if you can explain, in detail, what the above lines actually do. After all, you can learn mainframe programming from the web, right?

--
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by poot_rootbeer · 2003-05-21 10:11 · Score: 1

When I first encountered this system (where you have to enter process numbers and "AX" to send commands: for example "1234AX Y" to answer a y or n question a cobol program asks for) I thought they were kidding. Nope, this is how some banks actually process work, transactions, and reports/statements.

And it makes perfect sense. Why waste processor cycles on idling while you wait for the user to give a response? Just ask the question, go off and work on some other processes, and then when the user sends back "my answer is Y, and the question it is an answer to was 1234," act on it.

The end user should never have to concern themselves with such details as process numbers, though. That's what the client interface layer is for.
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by cyroth · 2003-05-21 11:02 · Score: 1

"1234AX Y"
This is a big chunk of my day! What about running backups? '1234oumt01' OUtput MagneticTape 01? yeah thats right you don't need spaces.
And don't even get me started on the printing subsystem.. ps save 104816, and have fun setting up a laser printer!
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by Arker · 2003-05-21 11:03 · Score: 3, Informative

How does linux freshen the mainframe labor pool, and not the Unix/Windows NT pool?

Real simple. You can run linux on IBM mainframes. They've done an excellent port and made it clear that they're committed to supporting it.

Now you still need a minimum old-school crew to run the actual mainframe stuff, but you can migrate your applications to Linux-in-a-VM instead of using Cobol JCL and all the other arcane mainframe stuff. So you get the best of both worlds - the incredible IO power of the mainframe can be harnessed to linux virtual machines, programmed maintained and administered by guys that don't need to know squat about the mainframe itself.

Places that are already using mainframes can continue to support all their legacy apps, but implement new systems in the linux environment with *nix people to run them. Eventually over the years the old systems are retired and the new ones are *nix, until there isn't really any need for anyone with what we think of as mainframe specific skills, except the service personel at IBM. And new buyers can get a clean start, never needing any real mainframe knowledge in house at all.

Well, presumably someone needs to learn enough to set up new VMs, but that's about it. Mainframes are incredibly resiliant and fault tolerant, you can blow out processors, hard drives and probably whole banks of memory without any interruption in service, even while the techs are installing new parts...

Let's see a mini or microcomputer where you can do that. Show me a mini/microcomputer that can push 20gig/second between memory and storage, and show it to me before the new mainframe comes out too, I understand it will be capable of 40gig/second.

These aren't supercomputers that can be replaced with beowulf clusters. They aren't computational giants at all - you definately can find minicomputers that can beat them in that arena. But there are many tasks where simply being able to do calculations quickly is not important. How many *nix database servers ever max their CPU? Most will run out of IO bandwidth before their CPU sees much load.

Mainframes are simply the pinnacle of reliability and IO power - these things can run huge mission-critical databases like nothing else. And thanks to the Linux porting, those databases can be run by anyone that could do the job on any other linux system, instead of being the sole preserve of dedicated mainframe people that are intimately familiar with dozens of ancient technologies most of us have never heard of.

--
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by wik · 2003-05-21 13:40 · Score: 1

Personally, I never like NX/View as much as AttachMate InfoConnect, though NX/View seemed to be the dominent T27 emulator at Unisys (my office was right next to the processor group).

It's definitely an impressive machine and a well-kept secret in computing. I wish there were more machines with the memory protections like in the A Series. It's amazing that after 30 - 40 years, the common machines still allow programmers to prance around with random pointers.

--
/ \
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
x
/ \
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 15:44 · Score: 0

You're right about the inherent rounding problems of binary floating point numbers:

e.g.

for (double d = 1.1; d = 1.5; d += 0.1)
System.out.println(d);

will only display 4 numbers.

Ever heard of a Binary Coded Decimal class?

The c++ based financial system I work on uses an off the shelf floating point BCD library. 30 significant figures, no rounding errors.
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by Obiwan+Kenobi · 2003-05-22 00:47 · Score: 1

Man, I hated Infoconnect. Not to mention we were wasting hundreds (upon hundreds) of dollars a year in licensing when NX/View was very much Free (as in beer) from Unisys.

We also had been using InfoConnect in transferring files over win3.11 serial connection (though it was still technically TCP/IP), and NX/Connect I believe it was called would install a shell module into Windows Explorer allowing you to "Copy as MCP Record Here", which saved thousands on licensing.

I loved all the free tools from Unisys. Print Control, NX/[blah] et al.

We actually tried to use NX/View bank-wide, but evidently there are some port collisions or something crazy going on, because if you ran more than 2 or 3 copies at once, a port managing program would freak out and we would have to shutdown and restore the network before we could get Premier II (the win32 interface) working properly again.

So most were stuck with Cadet, Infoconnect's little terminal proggy (as you well know), though me and the boss always got to run NX/View, and I liked its interface a 1000x better than chunky old cadet. Plus you could edit the drop down menus to send macros to the terminal, and that saved me a lot of time/trouble.

Did you ever see that easter egg in the Help - About section of NX/View? I'm trying to remember, something about holding shift or ctrl and clicking on various places would make this little blue guy in a tank show up and shoot around for a few, then disappear...
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by kip3f · 2003-05-22 02:10 · Score: 1

Given the first two lines of a JCL program and a web browser, I found A site with links to a bunch of manuals. I did some more searching, and here is what the first line means:
The first two lines are the 'Job card'.
U890898 - this is the 'Job name'.
REGION=2048K - the amount of memory required.

--
****Gfx Scrollbar Special case hit!!*****
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-22 02:59 · Score: 0

Ok, you get partial credit. Kind of interesting that you linked to my alma mater...

Oh, and these are the IBM manuals I was talking about - they tell you how to do something, but they're a far cry from an O'Reilly book.
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by Mittermeyer · 2003-05-22 09:03 · Score: 1

MCP was the second mainframe OS I learned (I am on my third). What you are describing is how Unisys took their proprietary A-series mainframe technology forward without having to incur the cost of the entire box. They just emulate it onto the backs of a Unix or WinNT/2K superserver.

Unisys was always big in banking and government. They still are.

I just loooooooove MCP. It is the greatest console environment ever. And the plain language commands and on-the-fly maintenance jobs typed in as syntax at the console is wonderful. And the logging, lord I still would love to have the logging facility in MVS, or any other platform for that matter.

What is really sad about the Unisys story is DMSII. The database package allowed you to do true online backups, no downtime or mirroring tricks, in the 1980s. They had it working on PC servers in the early 90's and could have taken the Oracle niche, but never saw the database as a strategic platform in it's own right.

--
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by JonK · 2003-05-22 10:03 · Score: 1

OK: I'll bite. Cut me some slack tho': it's been a while.
This is, I take it, IBM S/390 (specifically MVS/3090) JCL - without the JES bits, which begin /* rather than //. It's got to be fairly recent, 'cos IGYWCG was a fairly recent (late 90s anyway) addition
Line one has is a job statement: the job is named U890898 and is for username ACCT (aren't the single quotes optional unless you've got a space in your username?). I can't remember what the REGION parameter does: I'd hazard a guess that it's all about ensuring you don't grab too much of the LPAR you're running in... The job's to be scheduled as soon as possible, since you've not specified any TIMING or CLASS parameters and I *think* you're also dumping all the messages, since you've not specified MSGLEVEL or MSGCLASS parameters either - unless the operators have a default message setup for your LPAR
Line 2 is an execute statement: in step 1 of the job, we are to execute the catalogued procedure IGYWCG (this could more properly be written as //STEP1 EXEC PROC=IGYWCG) - compile and run the COBOL program. Now, this is where it all gets a little sketchy, because I'm not sure what the PARM set you've passed is: I assume CPARM is equivalent to PARM.COB but the PARM data don't ring any bells.
Do I get partial credit?

--
Cheers

Jon
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-22 12:13 · Score: 0

I'm going to assume that you either didn't actually look at these links, or that you did -- but didn't understand what you were looking at. Specifically, the link "with MVS JCL":
And Another with MVS JCL: http://www2.latech.edu/~acm/helloworld/asm370.html [latech.edu]
does not contain even a line of MVS JCL. That's S/390 assembly language.
Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what? by Obiwan+Kenobi · 2003-05-22 12:59 · Score: 1

Yeah, looking back it had some really nice features. Why it didn't have a better interface...

Even so, that odd MCP stuff just boggled the mind. I tried to play around in it a bit, astounded that it supported almost any SCSI device (CD writers, et al).

Never got in deep with the logs. I wrote a few WFLs, ran many many programs, updated MCP every few years or so. Interesting (not fun) times, for sure.

Always nice to hear from fellow MCP'ers ;)

An advantage of COBOL by Gonoff · 2003-05-21 05:59 · Score: 1

It is a lot easier to follow someone elses code. Could this be because it does not have to be Object Oriented?
Shopping lists are sequential and designed that way because that is a logical way to do things. Can someone design me an OO shopping list? It has to be as easy to use as the old fashioned one!

--
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.

Re:An advantage of COBOL by buffer-overflowed · 2003-05-21 06:13 · Score: 1

COBOL was designed IIRC so that non-programmers could understand it.

--
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
Re:An advantage of COBOL by Glock27 · 2003-05-21 06:15 · Score: 1

public interface ShoppingList {
void addItem(Item i);
void print();
}

Hope that helped! :-)

--
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Re:An advantage of COBOL by no+reason+to+be+here · 2003-05-21 06:19 · Score: 1

One could say that the grocery store itself is object oriented. The different aisles are the different objects, like merchandise being arranged with other like merchandise and such.
Of course, a grocery store metaphor doesn't really work in this situation. Going shopping is more like running queries on a database, to my mind.

*shrug*

--
my pet machine
Re:An advantage of COBOL by bobKali · 2003-05-21 06:19 · Score: 1

And you have obviously never tried to make changes to 40 year old, multalated, goto-infested, they-only-put-periods-in-where-they-were-required swine-code. Not to mention the small inconsistancies between differing flavors of COBOL that can really bite you when you change compilers.

Well written code is more a function of the programmer than the language. I've even seen easy-to-read Perl (believe it or not.) I do wish more languages had 88-levels and redefines though.
Re:An advantage of COBOL by Daniel+Boisvert · 2003-05-21 06:27 · Score: 1

As a former co-worker used to say when asked about explaining his modules to somebody else so they could be maintained after he left:

"..but COBOL is self-documenting!"
Re:An advantage of COBOL by MAXOMENOS · 2003-05-21 07:46 · Score: 1

By 1960s standards, it meets this criterion. By modern standards, it's pretty arcane in comparison to Java or Python.

--
Finding God in a Dog
Re:An advantage of COBOL by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 08:07 · Score: 0

My first boss was the master of the cobol goto. It was hell supporting the stuff he wrote. Bounce bounce bounce bounce. I figured that once I had his stuff figured out I'd have job security since he had forgotten it all and nobody else was willing/able to understand it.

So silly.
Re:An advantage of COBOL by PurpleFloyd · 2003-05-21 09:46 · Score: 1

I take it you've never had to slog through thousands and thousands of lines of awful spaghetti code. COBOL is like any other programming language in that it's possible to write easy-to-read code or write awful code; it's all up to the programmer. COBOL's use of global variables and GOTOs, however, makes it very easy to write bad and unreadable code. As for object-orientation, it's possible to pick up the basic concept in a few hours, and to follow well-written C++ or Java code (assuming you already know how to program in the first place). The difficult part of OO is figuring out how to implement it in the first place; well-written OO code is quite readable.

--

That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
Re:An advantage of COBOL by royalblue_tom · 2003-05-21 10:15 · Score: 1

Unless the previous coder littered it with goto statements (most original mainframe applications were written before gotos were considered a bad idea). I've seen COBOL where gotos were used inside loops.

Maintenance coding typically takes longer than writing a clean implementation. Following and changing someone else's code is a more difficult task than writing a program from scratch, as we are all individuals - and do things *our* way. Variable names differ, approaches differ. This is not something that comes out of which language is used, but how well the programmer structures the code, choses variable names, and so forth.

I'm sure someone can provide you a horrible example of COBOL, and an easy to follow version in C or Java. And I'm sure someone can show you badly done OO, and well done OO.

Remember Kent Beck's quote: "I'm not a great programmer; I'm a good programmer with great habits."
Re:An advantage of COBOL by ipxodi · 2003-05-21 13:42 · Score: 1

My old COBOL professor used to tell us -- COBOL stands for:
Compiles
Only
Because
Of
Luck

--
load "windows7" ,8,1

No place to experience/learn by Build6 · 2003-05-21 05:59 · Score: 4, Interesting

You know, I personally wouldn't mind learning Cobol, but I've got no place to "use" it on and develop anything that I'd find useful and therefore no way to both really "learn" it (gotta do an actual non-trivial project to really learn a language, no?) nor any reason to learn it "for" ("to possibly get a job" is no good).

And I personally wouldn't mind learning how to use a mainframe-type thing, but where am I going to find my own mainframe to muck about with? Everybody's got (or can get access to) a linux box to "learn Unix" on. Where on earth am I going to find an S/390? Try and get ahold of an Itanium with OpenVMS (which isn't really "mainframe" mainframe, is it?)?

Re:No place to experience/learn by eli173 · 2003-05-21 06:06 · Score: 4, Informative

Everybody's got (or can get access to) a linux box to "learn Unix" on. Where on earth am I going to find an S/390?

Maybe you should look here.
(It's an emulator for the ESA/390, etc.)

Eli
Re:No place to experience/learn by Mwongozi · 2003-05-21 06:06 · Score: 1, Redundant

Where on earth am I going to find an S/390?

Right here
Re:No place to experience/learn by Angry+White+Guy · 2003-05-21 06:07 · Score: 2, Funny

I actually have an old IBM system 38 at one of the buildings that my company owns. It's still there because we can't get it out without destroying the building. I'll let it go cheap :)

--
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
Re:No place to experience/learn by hendridm · 2003-05-21 06:22 · Score: 1

Agreed, I graduated 2 years ago and found that many of the tech jobs wanted RPG programming or JD Edwards experience. Where the fsck am I supposed to pick that up?! I'm willing to learn whatever it takes, but there are only so many things I can do. I can buy degrees and certificates, but I can't buy experience!
Re:No place to experience/learn by LumpyCartman · 2003-05-21 06:23 · Score: 1

HP has this site where you can test out different OSs on different hardware platforms
Re:No place to experience/learn by ocelotbob · 2003-05-21 06:23 · Score: 2, Informative

Actually, you've just got to look around a bit. Do like you learn any other programming language, pick up a cobol book. Got one myself on the bookshelf. Both windows and Linux have Cobol compilers available, google for them and you'll find dozens of hits, including some open source versions.
As far as finding an S/390 to work on, I'll admit it's hard to find the actual iron to bang on, but there's a damn good emulator for it. For learning OpenVMS, you don't have to use an Itanium; you can pick up an old VAX or Alpha for next to nothing off of ebay or the local surpluss place. Hell, if you don't want to get physical hardware, you can always emulate it; won't be fast, but it'll teach you the basics. And VMS-based systems are all over the board as far as their size goes. A single processor Alpha or VAX is very much a micro. A system or cluster with a dozen or so procs is getting into the midrange area, and the really big iron, like the VAX 7000, can ease into the high-end server/mainframe range when using VMS's built in insanely reliable clustering. Yeah, it'll be tough discovering a truly non-trivial project, but hey, that's part of learning.

--
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Re:No place to experience/learn by Build6 · 2003-05-21 06:24 · Score: 1

Thanks;

Emulation is fine (and conmicro is indeed the number 1 link when I google for "S/390 emulator") but I kinda feel emulation doesn't "do" it the way an actual, physical box does, that, you know, I can go up to and run my hands all over, feeling the smooth, cold metal underneath my palms while I gently caress.... erm, ok, where was I :-)

(Yes, I am joking. Honest.)

ANYWAYS, what I want to say is, emulation doesn't give the same feel to it as a real box. Linux under VMWare doesn't give me the same kind of compulsion to explore and learn something the way installing it onto a real machine where I muck about with the bootloader, screw up my partitions, reinstall, hack about, run X11/KDE/etc.; the point about emulators (for me anyway) is that you launch them to "do" something, in which case without any kind of directed (classroom?) course I wouldn't want to boot up an emulated "mainframe", because, what would I do with it? learn the equivalent of "ls", "pwd" ... and then? Whereas if there was a real box sitting there, it just... calls out to you to go tinker with it, no?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's psychological.

For me anyways.
Re:No place to experience/learn by bobKali · 2003-05-21 06:29 · Score: 1

Nah, OpenVMS isn't really "mainframe".

I do believe that there are a few COBOL compilers on sourceforge, and even a project to interface COBOL with Tcl.

I think that its uncommon way of handling variables in the data division makes it worth learning for the same reason Lisp is worth learning - it suggests new ways to handle problems that C, Java, etc... just don't necessarily suggest.
Re:No place to experience/learn by ocelotbob · 2003-05-21 06:35 · Score: 1

Course, you want some real iron, in which case, you can always use ebay if I weren't so broke meself, I'd probably just be crazy enough to bid on that big piece of iron.

--
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Re:No place to experience/learn by Vlad_the_Inhaler · 2003-05-21 06:44 · Score: 1

That 'problem' is part of my medium-term job security - it is getting very hard to acquire the necessary skills.
The other aspect is that the number of Mainframes is steadily diminishing, as are the numbers of people who can work them. Up until around 2000, my impression was that there were more jobs than people. With the slowdown (recession?) that has set in since, this is no longer the case.

At the moment, good Cobol programmers are out of work or working for peanuts. It only makes sense to learn the language if there is a good chance that this will change. If the company you work for offers you the chance, they think that they will need it so consider going for it. If not . . .

--
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Re:No place to experience/learn by Jay+Maynard · 2003-05-21 06:47 · Score: 1

Damn. The 9672-RB5 is a 2-CPU generation 4 CMOS box. The latter is significant because you need a generation 5 or 6 to run Linux well (the G5 was the one that introduced IEEE floating point). You can run Linux on a G4, but don't tell IBM about it.

$5K is probably overpriced for that box, as shops are madly getting rid of their G4 and earlier systems as quickly as they can.

--
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Re:No place to experience/learn by Fulcrum+of+Evil · 2003-05-21 06:54 · Score: 1

,i>It's still there because we can't get it out without destroying the building.

This sounds like a job for the M1 Incendiary safe destroyer!

--
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Re:No place to experience/learn by dukarukus · 2003-05-21 07:23 · Score: 0

"but bill jr., he was a daredevil., just like his old man. he was leaning out saying, 'hey everybody, look at me, look at me'. pow! he was decapitated."

my favorite line. you brought back some memories :)
Re:No place to experience/learn by eht · 2003-05-21 07:26 · Score: 1

That's really neat, have to check it out, but as an employer are you going to hire someone who only has experience on an emulator. If someone claimed to know Cisco and BGP and had only used Zebra are you going to trust them on your 10,000$ router? And that's a really bad example as some mainframe's go for quite a bit more 10,000$.
Re:No place to experience/learn by dogfart · 2003-05-21 07:43 · Score: 1

Where can I get one? Do they show up on eBay?
What about licensing a reasonably recent OS version?

--
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
Re:No place to experience/learn by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 09:27 · Score: 0

What, no one's got a screw-driver?
Re:No place to experience/learn by jport · 2003-05-21 11:26 · Score: 1

While it is hard to get an entry level job working on a mainframe it is certainly not impossible. I started out with a medical company about 3 years ago as a pc programmer (mostly windows, but I am slowly changing that!!) but now get to do virtually anything that is necessary. The great thing about my company is that if you show that you are competant then you are allowed to try new things. Programming and administering a mainframe are quite different from the pc world, but it is definitely a lot of fun. I have been allowed to learn almost everything as I go. I new very little when I started out but I now get to work on all sorts of projects. As soon as I get through implementing our new Cisco based VPN and building a new imaging server (complete with multi-terabyte NAS) I get to write a tcp/ip based registration system to run on our new AS400. An early version is already being used by some of our offices. My boss has even discussed giving me the old AS400 for my own! I have also been given permission to introduce desktop linux to users that don't have to run windows programs!! I know most companies aren't willing to give someone just starting out a chance. But if you show that you are willing to go the extra mile chances are someone will give you an opportunity to prove yourself. If you work hard, the benefits for both you and your company can be tremendous.
Re:No place to experience/learn by Build6 · 2003-05-21 21:13 · Score: 1

My boss has even discussed giving me the old AS400 for my own!

Kickass :-)

chance. But if you show that you are willing to go the extra mile chances are someone will give you an opportunity to prove yourself. If you work hard

Unfortunately I would disagree with you. Your company is one that HAS got old AS/400s to give away... not all/many do... .
Re:No place to experience/learn by Build6 · 2003-05-21 21:15 · Score: 1

You're also demonstrating knowledge that people who don't already have experience with mainframes won't have. Like, now, I can google for 9672-RB5 and so on, but the real value/worth of it, what it can do, etc., I'll have no idea... .
Re:No place to experience/learn by bziman · 2003-05-22 14:55 · Score: 1

Try and get ahold of an Itanium with OpenVMS (which isn't really "mainframe" mainframe, is it?)?
Well, my previous university, IUP, did all of their computing on an old VAX running OpenVMS. The system operators all had DEC Alphas on their desktops, but for some reason, the 10,000 students shared the VAX. Weird.
But anyway, part of the CS curriculum at IUP are two required COBOL courses. ALL the classes (except the two C++ classes and the one Unix class) were tought on the VAX. They even offered a FORTRAN class, but that's not relevent to this discussion.
When was this, you ask? I started in 1996 and dropped the hell out in 1998. Joined a startup, learned Java... and then got sent to every customer site who wanted to run our product on an AS/400 or other equally hideous platform.
Long and short -- it's still being taught at the university level, if you find one that's backwards enough. And it's definitely useful experience. If you can stand it, which I can't... so have at it!

So, the admins are old. by PhxBlue · 2003-05-21 06:00 · Score: 5, Insightful

What's the problem, here? If the 50-year-old programmer is the only one who knows jack about mainframes, hire the 50-year-old programmer. Don't whine about not having enough qualified programmers, when what you really want is just-out-of-college programmers that you can bully into working for you at half the salary of someone with real experience.

--
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.

Re:So, the admins are old. by yroJJory · 2003-05-21 06:03 · Score: 1

I think the general idea is that the 50-something programmer will most likely wish to retire soon. And that there may be a glut in the mainframe sysadmin market.

--
Jory
Re:So, the admins are old. by PhxBlue · 2003-05-21 06:22 · Score: 2, Insightful

I think the general idea is that the 50-something programmer will most likely wish to retire soon.

I'm old enough to remember when companies kept their employees on long enough to offer them retirement plans. . . and I'm only 28. So if the 50-something wants to retire "soon"--which is probably on the order of 10-15 years--that still gives you several years where you'll have his expertise available not only to do the job but to train newer and younger programmers as well. There's really no good reason not to hire a 50-something, from a long-term economic standpoint; but then, no one's accused American companies of being able to see beyond the next fiscal quarter.

--
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Re:So, the admins are old. by Tablizer · 2003-05-21 06:32 · Score: 1

Amen!

Corporations make every excuse in the world to get workers who are young, cheap, desparate, and foreign. They spend zillions lobbying congress to get more laws pass that allow them just that.

We don't live in a fricken democracy, but a bribe-ocracry. Politicians get elected by having more compaign money, and where does the biggest chunk of their compaign money come from? Corporations.

--
Table-ized A.I.
Re:So, the admins are old. by repetty · 2003-05-21 06:32 · Score: 1

"I think the general idea is that the 50-something programmer will most likely wish to retire soon."

Why do you think that?

--Richard
Re:So, the admins are old. by Schnapple · 2003-05-21 06:40 · Score: 0, Flamebait
Problems
1. The 50-year-old programmer will want more money. Not so much a problem for us as it is for the company in question.
2. The 50-year-old programmer will probably want to retire soon (as has been mentioned), meaning your pool of candidates is increasingly younger - and less likely to have any mainframe skills.
3. It's entirely possible that your 50-year-old programmer is working on being a 60-year-old programmer or even a 70-year-old programmer - i.e., badly in debt and no hope of retiring and increasingly feeble. Sure, we all know of people on the top of their game well into their 80's but these are the exceptions. Plus, odds are one of these days the programmer may die on you. I've read a statistic that in 15 years, 25% of the COBOL programmers in the world will be retired or dead.
4. The 50-year-old programmer isn't usually interested in innovation and tends to shun such things as this "web crap" - they just want to clock in their time and go home. In some cases this is fine, but in others it's a big issue.
Again, the answer to the problem today is "hire the 50-year-old programmer" but ten years from now it may be "where are all the programmers?" or "do we dare hire this 60-year-old programmer?". Outsourcing these guys to India may be seen in the same light as sweatshops for Nike - sure it sucks but can you find Americans willing to do the work for the money?
--
Schnapple
Re:So, the admins are old. by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 07:05 · Score: 0

Because to a 20-something, anything over fifty (or forty, for that matter) is damn near the end of life.
Re:So, the admins are old. by Anonymous+Codger · 2003-05-21 07:09 · Score: 3, Insightful

50-year-old programmers aren't interested in innovation? We just want to clock time and go home? What a total load of bigotted BS. Attitudes like this are the reason older programmers have such a hard time finding work. I will look forward with pleasure to the day you celebrate your 50th birthday in your shipping crate home because the next generation of ignorant, biased young whippersnapper managers won't hire you.

--
No sig? Sigh...
Re:So, the admins are old. by Schnapple · 2003-05-21 07:10 · Score: 1

Care to elaborate? I just got done working in a mainframe environment for two years, so I know of all the potential problems of mainframe programmers, though since the place I worked was less than ideal, I don't know of a lot of the pro's. My former coworker was more than thirty years older than me with no hope of retiring or moving jobs. Explain how I am a bigot for being observant.
A quick glance at your other replies on this topic indicates that you are probably an older gentleman who is a little bitter about their personal situation.

--
Schnapple
Re:So, the admins are old. by Schnapple · 2003-05-21 07:27 · Score: 1

OK, this is my last entry in this little flame war I seem to have started.
Right now the tech industry hates the old. I'm currently one of the ones that can profit from this attitude. I also fully realize it's going to bite me in the ass, so I hope this attitude changes.
And yes there are a lot of 50-year-old programmers who want to treat their gig like they were clocking out at the factory. There are also many 25-year-old programmers that feel this way as well. The difference is that the 25-year-old will have an easier time finding work for all the aforementioned reasons (lower pay, not wanting to retire soon), and will have an easier time switching jobs.
I'm not biased - if an older coder can outdo a younger one, give him the job. To hell with the cost.

--
Schnapple
Re:So, the admins are old. by dvk · 2003-05-21 07:32 · Score: 1

Not that I like the bribes, but check your facts first. Unions give no less money in bribers....errr.. donations, than companies.

--
"The right to figure things out for yourself is the only true freedom everyone shares. Go use it"-R.A.Heinlein
Re:So, the admins are old. by dogfart · 2003-05-21 07:47 · Score: 3, Interesting

The 50-year-old programmer isn't usually interested in innovation and tends to shun such things as this "web crap" - they just want to clock in their time and go home. In some cases this is fine, but in others it's a big issue.
In another 20-30 years, they will be saying this about Java and C++ programmers. Sometimes I feel like putting down money on which 20-something pierced and tattoo'd open systems nut is going to become the 50-year old curmudgeon.

--
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
Re:So, the admins are old. by Vlad_the_Inhaler · 2003-05-21 07:56 · Score: 1
1. The 50-year-old programmer will want more money. Not so much a problem for us as it is for the company in question.
  Correct. Will not 'work for food'.
2. The 50-year-old programmer will probably want to retire soon (as has been mentioned), meaning your pool of candidates is increasingly younger - and less likely to have any mainframe skills.
  That seems not to be the case where I am, but several of the older ones are not exactly interested in working more than a minimum
3. snip . . .I've read a statistic that in 15 years, 25% of the COBOL programmers in the world will be retired or dead.
  The two are not equivalent, but anyone above 50 will have retired in 15 years so that will be broadly correct
4. The 50-year-old programmer isn't usually interested in innovation and tends to shun such things as this "web crap" - they just want to clock in their time and go home. In some cases this is fine, but in others it's a big issue.
  Unwillingness to learn (new) skills has little to do with age. I know people that applies to, I know people where that could not be further from the truth
Again, the answer to the problem today is "hire the 50-year-old programmer" but ten years from now it may be "where are all the programmers?" or "do we dare hire this 60-year-old programmer?". Outsourcing these guys to India may be seen in the same light as sweatshops for Nike - sure it sucks but can you find Americans willing to do the work for the money?
Just out of interest, how many Indians can do this job well? Some people I know have just been replaced by a team in India so I will probably be getting some feedback on that one soon.
--
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Re:So, the admins are old. by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 08:03 · Score: 0

Bzzzt!

Sorry, try again.
Re:So, the admins are old. by Schnapple · 2003-05-21 08:33 · Score: 1

Just out of interest, how many Indians can do this job well?
I'm not sure but I think the general gist is that it's cheaper to pay Indian workers a small wage to maintain old code than it is to hire Americans to do the same thing or to rewrite it. How long this argument can hold water (i.e., how long before it really does have to be rewritten) remains to be seen.

--
Schnapple
Re:So, the admins are old. by conteXXt · 2003-05-21 08:48 · Score: 1

I think there are still plenty of COBOL programmers around. Not all of them retired after Y2K.

It's the admins that are hard to find.

--
The truth about Led Zep should never be told on /. (Karma suicide ensues)
Re:So, the admins are old. by swb · 2003-05-21 09:08 · Score: 1

Outsourcing these guys to India may be seen in the same light as sweatshops for Nike -- sure it sucks but can you find Americans willing to do the work for the money?

If your idea of money is pocket change, of course, they'll have to get slave labor from some dictatorship.

If they're willing to pay a wage that lets you live with some dignity, someone will do the work.
Re:So, the admins are old. by yroJJory · 2003-05-21 09:25 · Score: 1

Why? Because many people who've been at large companies for years tend to retire around 55. This isn't to say that all people do that or that it is expected. But many do.

My dad retired as soon as he could (because he spent much of his life working for the same company, only to be treated horribly during the last 5 years).

Now he consults for the company that he retired from and works HIS schedule with better pay AND a pension.

I would think that many mainframe sysadmins would be in a similar position.

--
Jory
Re:So, the admins are old. by kotj.mf · 2003-05-21 09:50 · Score: 1

Unions give no less money in bribers....errr.. donations, than companies.
Cite for that horseshit, por favor?
According to this list, corporations spent shitloads more than unions did last year. Of the top 10 industries/sectors, only one is a union, and it's #9. In fact, I count only five unions on that list of 50.
Granted, historically, unions in aggregate have spent more than anybody else, but these days the amounts are relatively piddling.

--
hang brain.
Re:So, the admins are old. by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 10:36 · Score: 0

> The 50-year-old programmer will want more money.

I haven't seen any of that. Wages are fairly consistant within any given IT group. Indeed, skills can vary by an order of magnitude while I rarely see salary vary by more than a few tens of percent within a job class. Compared to the lowest grunt on a given IT ladder, the most gifted typically pull in double, tops.

> The 50-year-old programmer will probably want to retire soon...

And the average IT job runs about 3 years.

> meaning your pool of candidates is increasingly younger - and less likely to have any mainframe skills.

If they don't have they skills, or more exactly won't learn them, they aren't candidiates.

> It's entirely possible that your 50-year-old programmer is working on being a 60-year-old programmer or even a 70-year-old programmer - i.e., badly in debt and no hope of retiring and increasingly feeble.

Pure unbridled biggotry. Performance is what performance does. Manage accordingly.

> Plus, odds are one of these days the programmer may die on you. I've read a statistic that in 15 years, 25% of the COBOL programmers in the world will be retired or dead.

Odd are, in 15 years, you'll have 5 new jobs too. What's the difference between a 20 something up and leaving one day, and a 60 something dying?

> The 50-year-old programmer isn't usually interested in innovation and tends to shun such things as this "web crap" - they just want to clock in their time and go home.

What a friggin biggot. I'm 45 and have done nothing in my career by lead technology by 5-7 years. All this before the advent of "The Age of Fashionable Computing".
Re:So, the admins are old. by fishbowl · 2003-05-21 14:18 · Score: 1

>Corporations.

Don't worry. Things can only get worse until huge numbers of people decide they have nothing to lose by destroying the whole system. Corporations may buy governments, but rebellions are the sole domain of the people.

Things not quite that bad yet? Count your blessings.

--
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Re:So, the admins are old. by PsibrII · 2003-05-21 16:29 · Score: 1

Don't get too cranky there old dude, might burst another blood vessel and have to put off that mid life crisis. There's a place for people who are washed up, useless, and have no skills, and that place is called City Council.
Re:So, the admins are old. by repetty · 2003-05-21 17:24 · Score: 1

"Care to elaborate?"

Nope.
Re:So, the admins are old. by Tablizer · 2003-05-21 17:35 · Score: 1

Unions give no less money in bribers....errr.. donations

But they tend to only/mostly represent blue-collar workers. Techies don't have much political voice, and it shows.

Thus, either we reduce the influence of campain donations (somehow, it is not easy), or us techies better get our political act in gear and lobby better.

--
Table-ized A.I.
Re:So, the admins are old. by dvk · 2003-05-21 23:51 · Score: 1

> Thus, either we reduce the influence of campain donations

While we're at it, we might as well prove P=NP, and learn how to teleport. Some things just can't be done :(

Where there's government, there's graft. Whether it is more "civilized" (lobbying) or less (bribes) is just about the only choice short of complete lack of any authority alltogether.

-DVK

-DVK

--
"The right to figure things out for yourself is the only true freedom everyone shares. Go use it"-R.A.Heinlein
Re:So, the admins are old. by Tablizer · 2003-05-22 05:50 · Score: 1

I think we should reduce the role of elected officials and vote on laws directly. Put things like H-1B's and labor laws on a national ballot instead of letting Congress vote. Individual States do this for State-wide laws.

--
Table-ized A.I.
Re:So, the admins are old. by dvk · 2003-05-22 14:02 · Score: 1

And then special interests will buy off votes even more easily - a bottle of beer/vote, anyone?

--
"The right to figure things out for yourself is the only true freedom everyone shares. Go use it"-R.A.Heinlein

Low pay by yroJJory · 2003-05-21 06:00 · Score: 3, Informative

Well, at $14/hr I can hardly blame IT guys for not bothering to learn how to SysAdmin a mainframe!

--
Jory

Re:Low pay by Billly+Gates · 2003-05-21 06:13 · Score: 1

$14/hr is the current market value. Go read this if you do not believe me. More specifically read this page here for IT labor. Don't you love shareholders and lobbiest from Bigcorp?

--
http://saveie6.com/
Re:Low pay by pauls2272 · 2003-05-21 06:43 · Score: 1

A mainframe "sysadmin" is called a system programmer. I've been doing it for 20 years. I have my own consulting company and multiple clients. My hourly salary is many times what you just quoted.

The knowledge is esoteric but profitable.
Re:Low pay by Blackknight · 2003-05-21 11:40 · Score: 1

$14 an hour is pretty damn good.

Sure, you won't be driving around a ferrari at $14 an hour, but you can still live quite comfortably at that salary.
Re:Low pay by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 14:28 · Score: 0

Depends on where you live.

Where I live, that salary would be about $500/month over living expenses, assuming one is frugal, and lucky. And I'm talking Phoenix AZ, not San Diego.

Now, if I could get that job along with a flexible enough schedule and tuition compensation, I'd take it because it would be exactly what I need to finish a Ph.D. and then retire as a math professor... which is what I want to do with my life. You'd think they'd make it a little easier to go on the course of becoming a teacher, but NO.
Re:Low pay by yroJJory · 2003-05-21 17:59 · Score: 1

$14 an hour is pretty damn good.

Sure, you won't be driving around a ferrari at $14 an hour, but you can still live quite comfortably at that salary.

I beg to differ. If you live in the middle of nowhere with a rent of $325/mo, perhaps it'd be "pretty damn good". But not in a place like the Bay Area, where rents are quite excessive. Mine is $1500/mo for a 2-bedroom/1-bath.

In the Bay Area, entry level jobs that pay $17/hr can be difficult to survive on. And don't forget that rent is only one part of the equation. The cost of living here is much higher than most places, too.

Most are not looking to drive a Ferrari, but would like to see salaries that are a little more on-par with the cost-of-living for an area.

--
Jory

training? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 06:01 · Score: 1, Insightful

So, what is the problem with hiring people with relaed experience and training them up on mainframes, assuming they don't mind pidgeon holing their careers? Training someone shouldn't be that hard, no? If no-one is going to train people in niche technologies isn't it obvious that there will be a shortage?

Finally an IT field that is NOT over populated by nurb432 · 2003-05-21 06:01 · Score: 1

Good thing I know Cobol and the big iron, and am still only in my late 30's..

I must be unique, but employable when times get worse then they are now..

"now accepting job offers" :)

--
---- Booth was a patriot ----

Re:Finally an IT field that is NOT over populated by Moose4 · 2003-05-21 07:56 · Score: 1

The job market must be a damnsight better where you are than where I am. COBOL programming jobs are few and far between.

--
"Settle down, Beavis. We've got an experiment to do."
Re:Finally an IT field that is NOT over populated by finkployd · 2003-05-21 07:58 · Score: 1

Haha, old timer! I'm a 24 year old systems programmer with three years experience working on IBM s/390 (now Z series) mainframes. And to boot, I have no family or social life (how could I, really?) to get in the way of working, so I'll take that job you had your eye on :)

Finkployd
Re:Finally an IT field that is NOT over populated by eatdave13 · 2003-05-21 09:08 · Score: 1

Ha! I'm a year younger, 23, and I'll see your 3 years experience and raise you two first place wins in statewide programming competitions!

Oh wait. A junior level position around here calls for 5 years experience, so I'll just keep my ISP helldesk job for now...

--
"Verbing weirds language." -- Calvin
Re:Finally an IT field that is NOT over populated by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 12:01 · Score: 0

Not to be too bitchy, but -
If you're employable, why do you need to announce now accepting job offers?
I mean, shouldn't you already be employed? :-)
Re:Finally an IT field that is NOT over populated by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 15:37 · Score: 0

Oh yeah, I have 2 1/2 years programming experience in Fortran. That is like money in the bank. Except you can't make a withdrawal or write checks on it.

main frame techies by pigscanfly.ca · 2003-05-21 06:01 · Score: 3, Insightful

I know a main frames adminstrator . Depending on what you mean by main frames , the newer unix based ones I wouldnt mind adminstering . The problem is that there are a whole wack of old crappy mainframes which are running legacy applications that very few people understanding sitting around . Now if there was somewhere to actually learn about how to handel those I would probably take the course ; but as it stands now most info systems degrees dont deel much with legacy applications . Maybe a college degree in legacy code / computing in addition to a BSC would be interesting (of course colleges would have to higher old qualified people) . An alternative would be "just read the manual" ; however if I "just read the manual" most places wont consider me comptenet (nor should they there are tones of undocumented "features") . What is really needed (if we are going to keep on using this legacy systems without relapcing them) is for a tech publisher to gather up a bunch of mainframe adminstrators and document all the undocument features in the older generation (and newer ones as well) of mainframes .

Re:main frame techies by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 08:14 · Score: 0

Well, the newer IBM mainframes are 64-bit and the newest can have 32-64 CPUs.

The tricky part is that while modern MVS ("z/OS") does have a Unixy part to it, and it is a branded UNIX(tm), the Unix part of admin work is very tiny. There are no "unix based" z/OS boxes, only z/OS boxes with the Unix subsystem up and running.

The Unix "kernel" is just another program that runs alongside the TCP/IP stack, the process scheduler, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

Unix and mainframe people don't speak the same language. When they use the same words they tend to have different meanings. Ask your mainframe admin friend what "storage" is, for example. Ask if z/OS has "threads". (It doesn't: it has tasks, which can have subtasks, which can have subtasks, etc. Tasks can be Unix processes or not, and you can have multiple Unix processes running in the same address space. A task can become a Unix process, get a pid, unbecome a process, become one again, stop again, etc.)

I have no experience with any other kind of mainframe.
Re:main frame techies by m1066ad · 2003-05-21 16:16 · Score: 1

Dude.Learn to spell. Damn, I'm constantly amazed at how many people can't spell, at all. Are these the same people writing code, for applications? No wonder so many are bug-ridden...
Re:main frame techies by pigscanfly.ca · 2003-05-22 04:23 · Score: 1

I happen to have a language learning disability . This makes it rather diffucult for me to spell words properly which I dont use very very commonly. With code its a slightly different story . There arent all that many different functions I'll use in one program , and if I speel them incorrectly it the compiler / interperter / assembler (depending on what language) will give me an error and I look up how to spell it . While I could also do this with slashdot posts , if people can still understand what I wrote thats good enough me.

Not too surprising really by Jack+Wagner · 2003-05-21 06:01 · Score: 2, Flamebait

I've done a smattering amoung of work on mainframes and I always find it quite refreshing for myriad reasons. First and foremost I can charge premium bucks since it's all about supply and demand. Secondly, it's always a pleasure to get to work on a real computer since most of my work these days is spent on that heinous X86 scrap that society seems to think passes for computers these days.

Lets face it, working on a FreeBSD box after working on an old mainframe is like driving a VW bug with flowers all over it after driving a boss 69 camereo.

And finally since the skillset to work on these is above and beyond that which your average windows admin/coder has, I am fairly secure in my knowledge that I have job security.

It's like Rick Brooks said in the Mythical Man Month, if you are in the upper 5% of computer scientists you will always be employed making in the upper 1% wage group.

Warmest regards,
--Jack

--

Wagner LLC Consulting Co. - Getting it right the first time

Re:Not too surprising really by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 06:08 · Score: 1, Funny

I believe that you mean Fred Brooks. Unless he has a brother named Rick that wrote an identically titled book.
Re:Not too surprising really by Realistic_Dragon · 2003-05-21 06:20 · Score: 1

And finally since the skillset to work on these is above and beyond that which your average windows admin/coder has, I am fairly secure in my knowledge that I have job security.

Having more skills than an average Windows admin/coder doesn't sound like a very hard thing to me :o) It takes about 15 minutes to get comfortable with WSH and active directory, and a further 10 minutes to install cygwin so that you can get some real work done.

In the near future I would expect that traditional mainframes will (slowly) be replaced by distributed computing for batch jobs - and as such the skilled jobs won't be for people with mainframe backgrounds but rather those with distributed computing skills. After all, your company probably already has a couple of billion FLOPS going to waste and that could be put to good use _without_ the problems that come attached to a supercomputer (the price tag for one and incrimental ugrades for another). For real time computing mainframes were always a bit ropey anyway, and so those jobs will probably continue moving to BFO UNIX boxes. Until cetralised computing comes back into fashion again of course...

--
Beep beep.
Re:Not too surprising really by Dr.+Zowie · 2003-05-21 06:24 · Score: 1

Lets face it, working on a FreeBSD box after working on an old mainframe is like driving a VW bug with flowers all over it after driving a boss 69 camereo.

Except that the VW bug, while it still looks tiny on the outside, has as much room as a doublewide trailer on the inside -- and someone replaced the air-cooled four-banger with a J-2 rocket engine. There are still no seat-belts.
Re:Not too surprising really by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 06:41 · Score: 0

Before spouting off...speak of what you know!! There is no such thing as a "boss" CAMARO (Notice the proper spelling of CAMARO!) The "boss" moniker was used by FORD! Nuff said!!
Re:Not too surprising really by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 06:41 · Score: 0

you, sir, are truly are an icon in trolldom.

Expertly, done.
Re:Not too surprising really by intermodal · 2003-05-21 07:33 · Score: 1

That, sir, was a remarkable troll. My hat is off to you.

--
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Re:Not too surprising really by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 07:52 · Score: 0

I think he meant "boss" as an old fogey synonym for "cool"

It was still anexcellent troll on his part. I like how he got modded to 5
Re:Not too surprising really by benzapp · 2003-05-21 07:56 · Score: 1

Someone really needs to save this post for future generations... This post is the finest troll I have ever read. I will no longer strive to be the best as I have witnessed the genius of Mr. Wagner.

--
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Re:Not too surprising really by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 08:24 · Score: 0

What's even worse is that this is the second time I've witnessed Mr. Wagner make this mistake. It leads one to believe 1) that's the only book he's ever read, since it's the only one he ever references in his responses and 2) he didn't read it very carefully, otherwise he'd note that it was FRED Brooks rather than Rick.
Re:Not too surprising really by Eamon+C · 2003-05-21 08:39 · Score: 1

if you are in the upper 5% of computer scientists you will always be employed making in the upper 1% wage group.
IHBT, but what does futzing around with Mainframes and FreeBSD boxen have to do with computer science? Are you really getting paid to analyze algorithms on this hardware?
Re:Not too surprising really by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 11:32 · Score: 0

Yes, but the seat belt mounts have been added (ACL support).
Re:Not too surprising really by cathouse · 2003-05-22 03:44 · Score: 1

I think that even more of an obstacle to comprehending mainframes than the total lack of scale relative to I/O mass/volume; is the [in current terms] incredably small instruction set.
AFAIK the ENTIRE INSTRUCTION SET of a 360/30 was less than the ADDED instructions which made the diferance between a Pentium 200 and a Pentium 200 MMX.
It takes a whole 'nother mindset.

--
Thelma, I'm not making ANY deals.

Let me get this right... by tamnir · 2003-05-21 06:02 · Score: 3, Funny

I have learnt Basic, Turbo Pascal, C, C++, Perl, Java, Python, Ruby and what not... But noooooo! Today, you must know Cobol to get a job!

Darn, I was just starting to get working on my Fortran...

--
I code, therefore I am.

Re:Let me get this right... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 06:13 · Score: 1, Funny

> I have learnt Basic, Turbo Pascal, C, C++, Perl, Java, Python, Ruby and what not... But noooooo! Today, you must know Cobol to get a job!

Maybe it was the edumacation section of your resume that costed you the jobs...
Re:Let me get this right... by tamnir · 2003-05-21 06:42 · Score: 1

(Posting without karma bonus because OT)

Try http://www.quia.com/cb/1027.html

--
I code, therefore I am.
Re:Let me get this right... by tamnir · 2003-05-21 06:45 · Score: 1

(OT, no karma bonus)

Argh, 2 mistakes, my English still sucks! :-)

--
I code, therefore I am.
Re:Let me get this right... by snkline · 2003-05-21 07:37 · Score: 1

Ya know, Cobol was the first programming language I learned (23 years old here.) My first experience programming was when I was in the Business Proffesionals of America in high school, and for the yearly competition I decided to do programming. The programming language used for the competition was Cobol, C++ wasn't used until the following year. I remember it very unfondly, Cobol was a real pain to work with, almost as bad as Fortran (I remember debugging a Fortran program for 2 hours, until I found the problem was a label in the wrong column.)

Bullshit. by Bowie+J.+Poag · 2003-05-21 06:03 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Got 7 flavors of Unix under my belt, mainfraime experience both from the administration end as well as the programmer end, plenty of certs.

I'm right here. You can hire me today instead of paying for Long Duck Dong to hop on a boat.

--
Bowie J. Poag

Re:Bullshit. by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 06:05 · Score: 0

du0d no offense, but having read a lot of your comments the reason you are having trouble getting work is you have an atrocious attitude. you really need to work on your people skills. really. seriously. you have a problem.
Re:Bullshit. by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 06:46 · Score: 0

wow, you are universally hated. I always enjoyed your idiotic comments on something awful... Now I can enjoy them here as well. I suggest you take all your certifications and do something useful with them, like start a bonfire to keep your unemployed ass warm. I don't know though... thats a lot of ego to warm. You might want to take up pyromania so that you can be assured of enough fuel
Re:Bullshit. by finkployd · 2003-05-21 08:06 · Score: 1

Mainframe experience meaning exactly what?

Have you written any exits in assembly for JES2 (or
JES3, if you are a wierdo)

Have you ever done a sysgen of os/390?

I assume you have plenty of experience working with SMP/E?

Have you ever defined policies for WLM?

Finkployd
Re:Bullshit. by easter1916 · 2003-05-21 08:37 · Score: 1

You can hire me today instead of paying for Long Duck Dong to hop on a boat.
Hello, little racist.
Re:Bullshit. by Jay+Maynard · 2003-05-21 09:12 · Score: 1

Have you ever done a sysgen of os/390?

I thought OS/390 didn't need sysgenning any more, since the advent of HCD. Then again, I bailed out of MVS for a living at MVS/ESA 4, so what do I know?

--
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Re:Bullshit. by tuomoks · 2003-05-21 11:17 · Score: 1

We should make a systems programmer requiremets list of these : JES exits ( yes, both 2 and 3 ), SVCs (yes), TSO exits (yes), channel programs for dasd/tape/?? (yes,yes,yes), how many APARs ?, sysgens OS??? (MFT,MVT,VM,VS1,SVS,MVS, version? ), VTAM,NCP,PEP configurations, IMS(DB/DC) configurations/coding (didn't forget to sysgen the cleanup??), CICS configurations/coding, VSAM environment ?, and of course as you said SMP, WLM, SMF, RMF, RACF, installation backup / recovery plans and testing?, forecasting ( BEST/1, other ), tuning ?, operator procedures ?, .... - and of course, how many lunches and dinners from IBM salesmen ?? Number of SHARE / GUIDE trips ? - I really miss the good old days !! Back to PC !

Legacy by Root+Down · 2003-05-21 06:04 · Score: 5, Interesting

The word "legacy" keeps popping up in correlation with mainframes, and this is really why most of them are still around - legacy code that no one wants to re-do for other systems. However, new applications are typically being written for scalable, multi-component architectures, not mainframes.
The reasons for keeping the legacy systems are obvious: cost of conversion, proven correctness, etc. However, I still think the scalability and reliability (e.g.: redundancy, resource pooling, load balancing, etc.) of NoW (Networks of Workstations) will in time push both the mainframe and nearly anachronistic programming language Cobol out the door. It's a simple matter of economics: it costs less to design, construct, implement, maintain and re-tool the different components of a distributed system as opposed to that of a mainframe.

Culler's paper on NoW is a classic.

Re:Legacy by override11 · 2003-05-21 06:26 · Score: 3, Insightful

while legacy has something to do with it, the 100% uptime (with voluntary IPL's) of our iSeries mainframe is very compelling.

Here's the scenario: A hdd fails, the system automatically calls IBM and a tech is dispatched the same day. I get paged, and meet a tech at the front door.

IBM Tech
I heard you have a drive failure here

Me
I do??

IBM Tech
No problem, I have a drive right here, it will only take a second to swap it out

He swaps out said drive, zero down time, and nary a performance hit because a hot spare came online. You have got to love that kind of service and uptime, and just plain reliability.

--
No I didnt spell check this post...
Re:Legacy by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 06:34 · Score: 0

Ok so why are you paid, when you don't even know whats happening with your own system??
Re:Legacy by Vlad_the_Inhaler · 2003-05-21 06:36 · Score: 1

I work on non-IBM mainframes, the discs are from EMC. They offer the same service and have done so for a few years now. It is not rocket-science, the disc cabinet has a modem which they dial into every couple of days. With that and mirrored cabinets - both with Raid-5 - no problem.

The fun one was when a cabinet died completely with some sort of power failure which no-one could explain and was apparently impossible. Well, with mirrored cabinets, the only symptom was a major slowdown when we re-established mirroring that evening.

--
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Re:Legacy by k98sven · 2003-05-21 06:39 · Score: 1

The reasons for keeping the legacy systems are obvious: cost of conversion, proven correctness, etc. However, I still think the scalability and reliability (e.g.: redundancy, resource pooling, load balancing, etc.) of NoW (Networks of Workstations) will in time push both the mainframe and nearly anachronistic programming language Cobol out the door. It's a simple matter of economics: it costs less to design, construct, implement, maintain and re-tool the different components of a distributed system as opposed to that of a mainframe.

Well.. they've been saying that for years and years now, and it just hasn't shown itself to be true.

Mainframes have a completly different design and philosophy from the ground up.
They are machines built for a specific purpose. (handling massive amounts of data and I/O reliably and securely)

Workstations just aren't like that.. A multi-purpose machine will never outbeat a machine built for a specific purpose.

I know a mainframe guy who's been in the business for 30 years. He's yet to se a machine 'crash' (in the PC sense of the word).. Replace that with 100 workstations and you'll always have something to fix..
Re:Legacy by BitwizeGHC · 2003-05-21 06:42 · Score: 4, Insightful

Bjarne Stroustrup has been known to observe that the primary difference between "legacy" systems and the systems replacing them is that the legacy system works and scales.

A case can be built for the verity of that assertion as applied to the mainframe situation.

--
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Re:Legacy by Tablizer · 2003-05-21 06:43 · Score: 1

But if we have good HTTP browser GUI protocols (not quite yet), then we don't need a lot of distributed systems. If it does not matter where on the internet/intranet your servers are, then why not have one big server, or at least one big server room?

Distributed apps are tricky to partitian. If you partitian by say sales area, you still cannot physically partition by product line (since products are available to every sales office). Physical divisions and logical data divisions can only correlate on one variable (or entity splitting) for the most part, but usually there are multiple candidate variables, and these are not likely to split geographically.

Perhaps these central servers may be clustered or something, but I see no reason to spread them all over the map (except for maybe backups and the emergancy mirror centers).

I don't get this "distributed" movement. I suspect it is hype from SUN trying to sell more Java boxes.

--
Table-ized A.I.
Re:Legacy by pauls2272 · 2003-05-21 06:56 · Score: 2, Informative

All completely WRONG. Keep reading airplane magazines.

Distributed systems are 20+ years behind the mainframe in "scalability and reliability (e.g. redundancy, resource pooling, load balancing, etc)".

These are the WEAK POINTS of "distributed systems".

They are just starting the concept of LPARS (logical partitions) on midrange boxes. Something the mainframe been doing for many many years.

Don't even get me started on the inability of "distributed systems" to be secure or be recovered at Disaster Recovery.

One shop I work at, we have 6 different passwords to the various distributed systems they have implemented - everything from SAP/R3 to Peoplesoft.

They also had a study done from the Gartner Group about recovering all their new midrange distributed systems at a Disaster Recovery (this was post 9/11 because their plan prior to 9/11 was don't worry about DR). Gartner estimated that IF their systems could be recovered, it would take a minimum of 21 DAYS. What business will remain in business down a month?

The mainframe, of course, is recovered in less than 18 hours.

But that is the difference between the REAL WORLD and collegiate studies.

Paul

PS Would you rather pull a heavy wagon with a large horse or a hundred chickens?
Re:Legacy by bonius_rex · 2003-05-21 07:01 · Score: 1

I have the exact same arrangement on my IBM x345 2U Intel boxen.
This isn't something special about the mainframe. IBM is moving a lot of it's Mainframe hardware technology into the xSeries servers. (chipkill memory, hotswap hardware, etc.)
Re:Legacy by bobKali · 2003-05-21 07:04 · Score: 2, Funny

NoW (Networks of Workstations) will in time push both the mainframe and nearly anachronistic programming language Cobol out the door

Yup, I first heard that back in 1981. Given enough time I'm sure that will be true. Of course, given enough time a room full of Eminems with tape recorders could eventually record some music.
Re:Legacy by jedidiah · 2003-05-21 07:36 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Smaller distributed systems are perfectlly capable of being recoverable in 18 MINUTES. If you're bragging about mainframes being recoverable in 18 hours, you simply need to get over yourself.

System recovery time is simply a function of the commitment level of management.

--
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Re:Legacy by pauls2272 · 2003-05-21 07:47 · Score: 1

"smaller distributed systems" - I agree, if it is a very small system. "System recovery time is simply a function of the commitment level of management" - it is a function of cost not management. I was talking about a specific site (Real Life where we do DR tests). Large mainframe shops have Geoplexes where if one site fails the others automatically take over the workload. For instance, on 9/11 a company's datacenter located at the World Trade center was destroyed. Their customers didn't know it since all processing transferred seamlessly to another datacenter in New Jersey. This is massively expensive so most shops don't do anything like this for DR. Just backup stuff to tape and restore at DR (as we do at this one shop).
Re:Legacy by finkployd · 2003-05-21 07:50 · Score: 1

Smaller distributed systems are perfectlly capable of being recoverable in 18 MINUTES.

I highly doubt most mainframe installations will be easily converted to "smaller distributed systems"

"Giant, convoluted distributed systems with multiple points of failure", perhaps.... :)

Finkployd
Re:Legacy by easter1916 · 2003-05-21 08:34 · Score: 1

The iSeries, formerly known as the AS/400, is a midrange system, not a mainframe. I know. I spent 12 years working on 400s.
Re:Legacy by ScuzzMonkey · 2003-05-21 09:52 · Score: 0

It's the 'voluntary' IPLs that get me. Here everyone slams on MS all the time because you used to have to reboot NT all the time to keep it stable, while no one mentions that you essentially have to do the same thing with these expensive IBM wonder-boxes. I had not had to work with AS/400 until my present position, and I gotta say, I'm not impressed. An Intel server from a reliable vendor with a well-installed and patched operating system is just as stable and a heck of a lot cheaper.

Could be our consultants are all just morons, and I freely admit I don't know the systems that well, but nothing I have seen has convinced me the iSeries is a good investment (although IBM support is stellar--if you don't mind going through five people per call to get to the helpful one). Of course, not even IBM claims iSeries as mainframes ("midrange servers" whatever that is), so maybe you typoed and meant something I haven't worked with, too, the zSeries.

--
No relation to Happy Monkey
Re:Legacy by poot_rootbeer · 2003-05-21 10:17 · Score: 1

It's a simple matter of economics: it costs less to design, construct, implement, maintain and re-tool the different components of a distributed system as opposed to that of a mainframe.

But you also multiply the potential points of failure, no? "Big iron" such as mainframes and enterprise-class servers (AS/400 and so forth) undergo much stricter QA testing than any off-the-shelf workstation component you can buy.
Re:Legacy by stanwirth · 2003-05-21 12:13 · Score: 1

He swaps out said drive, zero down time, and nary a performance hit because a hot spare came online. You have got to love that kind of service and uptime, and just plain reliability.

Yup! AS/400's (aka iSeries) are like the Energizer Bunny.

In the database wars, you have to remember that the chip the AS/400 is based on has been native 64 bit for a long time (great for batch transaction processing on large tables--one place Oracle falls down big-time on any platform) and the instruction set is geared towards RDBs. What do you expect from a company that's been building and processing databases since the turn of the last century -- that's right, Hollerith's cards were used in the 1900 census, which are, BTW, the same size as a 1900's US dollar bill.

IBM learned a lot about databases from developing applications on machines that process enormous stacks of punch-cards mechanically--including searches, sorts and selects based on various criteria. Unfortunately in the German census processing in the 1930's, one of these criteria they sorted, searched and selected on was "who is a Jew?" -- and the IBM punch-cards these data were recorded on were imprinted with swastikas.

I wonder if anybody's looked at the business transactions recorded in cuneiform to see if one could scan down the columns and across the rows visually to detect patterns and anomalies (much in the same way BA's look at long columns of numbers in their spreadsheets). This would be the earliest example of data processing. Tremendous reliability of the physical media, too.
Re:Legacy by CharlesEGrant · 2003-05-21 17:41 · Score: 1

I've heard that mainframe shops take a very strict attitude towards unexpected downtime. I've heard a couple "friend of friend" stories about admins being fired on the spot when a system crashed. Any truth to this?
Re:Legacy by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 23:51 · Score: 0

Yes, Ive seen postings on IBM-MAIN to this effect. Ive taken a mainframe out and survived, as it wasnt a mission critical one, and it was an honest mistake. I think the firings are for breach of procedure more than honest cockups. Thats also what is missing in most of the discussion Ive seen. zOS sites are very procedures led. Wanna move the customer database to a new disk? It can take a month to implement, as the proposal has to be approved by management, tested on a test system, backout contigencies outlined and then scheduled for the monthly (or less) IPL slot. The other thing missing from most comments is the fundamental difference in scale between zOS batch workloads and web hosts. You might think 100,000 web hits is a thorough slashdotting, but thats nothing to the millions and millions of hits per day someone like Visa will get in the Xmas runup. Its cos Amazon, Ebay, Walmart, ToysRUs, etc are all passing transactions through to Visa, so Visas system has to be as strong as all those tiddlers put together. BTW, Im an 30something MF guy, and I think zOS will eventually wither and die in the same way VMS and VM have (although there are still VMS and VM systems out there). But that is 20 or so years away.
Re:Legacy by jedidiah · 2003-05-22 04:42 · Score: 1

What costs a department is willing to bear is clearly a function of management. A company can either front the money for a proper disaster recovery plan, or it can choose to bury it's head in the sand and just hope they never have to recover their server(s).

This can be as simple as having spare parts on hand, or as expensive as replicating your entire datacenter.

This is isn't a "mainframe" vs "microcomputer" issue.

Mainframe vendors may disallow you from buying a robust system. However that is a matter of policy, not capabilities.

--
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Re:Legacy by Mittermeyer · 2003-05-22 09:14 · Score: 1

The value represented in the mainframe is not just the old code or scalability, it is a culture that prizes care, backwards-compatibility, and stability.

Don't get me wrong, mainframes are not for every situation. But network bigots haven't driven off the dinosaurs anymore then the dinos have eaten the small machines. Get the right tool for the right job.

And your economics don't work if the admin costs of an NoW gets out of control (which is likely given what happens to most shops).

Check out this paper about real-world TCO- the lizard ain't dead.

--
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________

Heavily Sarcastic reasoning for this by Elpacoloco · 2003-05-21 06:06 · Score: 2, Funny

Us younger people don't have mainframes to play with. I'm 22 and I have never ever seen a mainframe. Anywhere. I don't even know what kind of software or operating system they have. Other than they might have a cobol compiler.

I can code cobol. But I'd rather gouge out my eyes with a sharp stick.

Re:Heavily Sarcastic reasoning for this by Daniel+Boisvert · 2003-05-21 06:17 · Score: 1

They look like this.

--except you mostly see them through small wire-reinforced windows on doors with keypads or biometric locks on them... :)
Re:Heavily Sarcastic reasoning for this by repetty · 2003-05-21 06:21 · Score: 2, Funny

"I'm 22 and I have never ever seen a mainframe."

I think you just made an insightful observation.

At 22 you ain't done shit yet.

--Richard
Re:Heavily Sarcastic reasoning for this by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 06:24 · Score: 0

I'm 21, been a mainframe operator since high school graduation. since I was hired, everyone after me all had degrees or were 90% finished with degrees, all in their 20's

its about knowing people, or finding the right place.
Re:Heavily Sarcastic reasoning for this by Tower · 2003-05-21 06:30 · Score: 1

Oh..... so that's what they look like with the covers *on*...

--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Re:Heavily Sarcastic reasoning for this by cruff · 2003-05-21 07:34 · Score: 1

The high end POWER4 based systems also look like
that too, so you could be pulling the wool over someone's eyes. :-) The reason is that both the z Series and the POWER4 SP systems share a lot of their underlying hardware.
Re:Heavily Sarcastic reasoning for this by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 08:54 · Score: 0

But add a room full of DASD (needed), printers (needed), consoles (needed) and optical platters (optional) as well as other stuff and it will look dwarfed. :-)
Re:Heavily Sarcastic reasoning for this by PsibrII · 2003-05-21 16:21 · Score: 1

You can see plenty of mainframes at scrapyards around the US. Most of those probably died due to people storing the dead mainframe operators in the guts and forgetting them there for years.

Mainframe Techies Are A Dying Breed by Gibble · 2003-05-21 06:07 · Score: 1

Mainframe Techies Are A Dying Breed...Damn SARS

Sys Admin Reduction Syndrome

--
Gibble: Descriptive of an emotional state in which one's mind is scrabbling for some purchase on reality

Re:Mainframe Techies Are A Dying Breed by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 06:39 · Score: 0

worst ever

Dupe by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 06:08 · Score: 0

Hum... is slashdot into predicting the future now? 2 months ago there was a shortage on the horizon, now there is one!

Hire from Canadian Colleges by phorm · 2003-05-21 06:09 · Score: 1

Well, perhaps more particularly in BC, or the one I graduated from... they have 2 semesters with COBOL and VAX courses. I found them completely useless, but hey I was good at it so anyone wanted to hire a COBOL coder for $50-$100/h, feel free to call me, or try and find some of our cheaper students by dropping in the local college.

Re:Hire from Canadian Colleges by Networkink*Man · 2003-05-21 06:23 · Score: 1

I too, had 2 semesters of COBOL / CICS worked into my Information Systems degree.

I thought it was a bunch of hooey ... until I walked into a Fifth-Third bank branch and a bunch of their teller-terminals had a familiar CICS-looking screen.

Hmm - :)

--
"How am I supposed to remember you, when you won't let me forget?" --Bare Naked Ladies

Nice 'Mainframe' picture. by bockris · 2003-05-21 06:09 · Score: 1

Any one notice the picture of the Earth Simulator at the top of the article.

Re:Nice 'Mainframe' picture. by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 08:46 · Score: 0

I'll bet very few people have noticed -- or even know what the Earth Simulator is. I'm a climate modeller, and the rising sun cabinets jumped right out at me!

http://www.es.jamstec.go.jp/esc/eng/ES/hardware. ht ml
http://www.es.jamstec.go.jp/esc/eng/Hardware/p nc.h tml

These are a few processor nodes in a cluster of NEC SX-6s, now available in the U.S. from Cray.

"The ES is a highly parallel vector supercomputer system of the distributed-memory type, and consisted of 640 processor nodes (PNs) connected by 640x640 single-stage crossbar switches. Each PN is a system with a shared memory, consisting of 8 vector-type arithmetic processors (APs), a 16-GB main memory system (MS), a remote access control unit (RCU), and an I/O processor. The peak performance of each AP is 8Gflops. The ES as a whole thus consists of 5120 APs with 10 TB of main memory and the theoretical performance of 40Tflops."
Re:Nice 'Mainframe' picture. by Jay+Maynard · 2003-05-21 09:15 · Score: 1

Bitty, bytie, bytie, bit.

Holy, holy, holy shit.

That's one serious box.

--
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!

Re:A question... An answer! by override11 · 2003-05-21 06:10 · Score: 0, Offtopic

This question is most easily answered by going here:

Unixsex.com
Look over your shoulder when opening this one at work. :) Funny stuff, hehe.

--
No I didnt spell check this post...

It has to be said. by grub · 2003-05-21 06:10 · Score: 1

It is official; Netcraft now confirms: Mainframe techies are dying.

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Mainframe techie community when Slashdot confirmed that Mainframe techies are aging beasts. Mainframe techie share has dropped yet again while the 20-somethings make up a large percentage of the mainframe techie target market. Mainframe techies are collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in recent Viagra and fitness tests.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict a mainframe techie's future. The hand writing is on the wall: mainframe techies face a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for mainframe techies because mainframe techies are dying. Things are looking very bad for mainframe techies. Their offices are dark, the tomb-like sepulchral atmosphere is all that remains. Mainframe techies continues to lose numbers as they die of old age.

Obituary ink flows like a river of blood.

All major surveys show that mainframe techies have steadily declined in population. Mainframe techies are very sick and their long term survival prospects are very dim. If Mainframe techies are to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers and hangers-on. Mainframe techies continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save them at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Mainframes and their techies are dead.

Fact: Mainframe techies are dying

--
Trolling is a art,

Or... by fireboy1919 · 2003-05-21 06:11 · Score: 3, Interesting

maybe we can learn it on our own!

Yeah, thats it! I'll just buy myself a mainframe and...oh wait.

The problem is that the only way to get mainframe experience today is to have access to one.

Who does?

Still, I think the closest thing we can get is playing with Linux from the ground up. As a Solaris user, I can say that a lot of the internals are the same. Except, of course, that all the non-gnu versions of software suck compared to their Linux equivalents.

In fact, when I think about it, the biggest problem is employer disbelief. Can you admin Mainframes if you can admin Linux boxes? Pretty close:
-You can know NFS,AFS, and Samba
-You can know Apache
-You can know X11
-You can know sendmail/postfix
-You can know telnet/ssh/rsh
-You can know how to install security updates

I could be wrong, but I think the stuff that you don't know beyond this boils down to quirks that are dependent upon the specific mainframe.

Unless, of course, you're talking about those really old mainframes that do less than my computers do (though they're more reliable), and serve only one very, very specific purpose. For those I should think it would be obvious why there aren't more people working on it. It's way too specialized. You want somebody that knows the accounting system for one bank on a VAX that was put there in 1975 and hasn't been changed since? Talk to the guy that wrote it. How will anyone else know?

--
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!

Re:Or... by doinky · 2003-05-21 06:28 · Score: 2, Informative

-You can know NFS,AFS, and Samba -You can know Apache -You can know X11 -You can know sendmail/postfix -You can know telnet/ssh/rsh -You can know how to install security updates
Dude, when I used a mainframe for school back in the early 90s, none of that stuff except sendmail would have even REMOTELY been applicable. I think perhaps you don't know what mainframes _are_.
Re:Or... by Brummund · 2003-05-21 06:40 · Score: 2, Funny

As a Solaris user, I can say that a lot of the internals are the same. Except, of course, that all the non-gnu versions of software suck compared to their Linux equivalents.

Tell me about it. :-) A few weeks ago I was to install my app on a Solaris box. The clueful admins obviously didn't like to waste precious disk space on utilities not really necessary, and of course Sun's tar barfed on my GNU tar archives etc. After some time, I found the magic -i switch (I think it was), and was ready to deploy my app.

When I had deployed it and started testing, the app seemed to have a problem connecting to another host on the network. So, I
jumped into /bin/sh (why waste space on GNU bash?) and typed
$ ping hostname sh: ping: not found
(And no, it wasn't a problem with PATH) :-)
Re:Or... by awx · 2003-05-21 06:41 · Score: 2, Informative

Sorry, but you're way off here. Mainframes are much different beasts to what you seem to be thinking of. They're not big PCs. And no, a VAX is not a mainframe, a VAX is a mini.

--
Feel that power? That's mah MOUSING FINGER
Re:Or... by plopez · 2003-05-21 06:51 · Score: 3, Informative

http://www.conmicro.cx/hercules/

mvs emulator.

JCL... the horror.... the horror :)

--
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Re:Or... by belroth · 2003-05-21 07:00 · Score: 5, Informative

In fact, when I think about it, the biggest problem is employer disbelief. Can you admin Mainframes if you can admin Linux boxes? Pretty close:
-You can know NFS,AFS, and Samba
-You can know Apache
-You can know X11
-You can know sendmail/postfix
-You can know telnet/ssh/rsh
-You can know how to install security updates

I could be wrong, but I think the stuff that you don't know beyond this boils down to quirks that are dependent upon the specific mainframe.
You are wrong :-)
For the most part most of the things you list are at best peripheral - they are now appearing but are not mainstream.
Learn z/OS (or os370, MVS etc) and or one of the VM family. Study Rexx, JCL and RACF/ACF2 and a few of the common utilities such as IEFBR14, IEHLIST, IEBGENR, IEBPTPCH (there are hundreds more). That lot may get you a junior post, unless a company is running a linux partition on their machine the linux skills will be next to useless. An old fashioned site (most, I suspect) will have no perl, vi, emacs or anything you'd expect on a nix box, and there is no gui, interaction is screen based, probably using ISPF under TSO. Connectivity is probably still using SNA although tcp/ip may be a possibility.
Some of the m/f software I mention may have been superceded, but the new versions build on the old. IBM are, deliberately, rarely revolutionary, evolution is their strong point. They do their best to ensure old programs run on new machines wherever possible.

--
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
Re:Or... by Vlad_the_Inhaler · 2003-05-21 07:10 · Score: 5, Informative

The mainframe I work on does not run under unix, it runs under a proprietary OS which originally predates unix by at least a decade. The only thing it has in common with unix is that it uses a command-line interface.

NFS, AFS, Apache, X11, sendmail/postfix, ssh/rsh have no counterparts on this mainframe - if we need something like that then we interface to a linux/NT machine.
Samba does have an equivalent, but it looks totally different.
The machine can act as a Telnet server, if you allow that.
The normal connection software is via software that emulates their old terminals, several companies sell different emulators.

Some of your TCP/IP knowledge could be of use, but that is all. You obviously have no idea how the thing works or what it can do (just as I have very little idea of kernel internals, for example) and an employer would see that immediately.

I worked on these beasts for almost 20 years before being confronted with linux. I can write primitive bash and perl scripts, and configure+administer a server. This makes me the only person in the group who can and makes me a 'linux expert' (!), they are that different.

--
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Re:Or... by finkployd · 2003-05-21 07:31 · Score: 3, Informative

Were you to try to do ANYTHING with a mainframe (I'm thinking s/390 or z/OS here) armed with the knowledge you mentioned you would be so horribly lost it wouldn't even be funny.

Finkployd
Re:Or... by dogfart · 2003-05-21 07:33 · Score: 2, Insightful

And what do you use for the OS?
My understanding is that some 20-30 year old predecessor to MVS (or OS/390 or z/OS) is in the public domain, but obtaining more recent versions is very expensive (unless you use a pirated version - anyone know a z/OS warez site?).
And what you will need is more than the OS, there are other utilities that are also licensed by IBM and cost a fortune.
You might be able to learn a bit of JCL and some basic TSO commands on Hercules + an ancient mainframe OS, but you would not be qualified to do more than the most elementary tasks on any modern production mainframe.
If IBM was smart, they would release a z/OS for Linux package, including basic compilers and utilities, just for hobbyists and students.
Is anyone at IBM listening?

--
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
Re:Or... by richieb · 2003-05-21 07:35 · Score: 1

JCL... the horror.... the horror :)
Hey, let's find some DASD-ee. You know IEFBR14 was my favorite mainframe program. Stick that in your partitioned data set!
On the other hand under MVS you have dynamic linking (sort of like Java) :-)

--
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Re:Or... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 08:15 · Score: 0

"I could be wrong, but I think the stuff that you don't know beyond this boils down to quirks that are dependent upon the specific mainframe."

Some of those "quirks" can be pretty complicated. Especially when you get into proprietary hardware, weird networking issues, and business-rules-based policy and controls.
Re:Or... by catfood · 2003-05-21 08:16 · Score: 4, Informative

Fully aware the IBM minis are not mainframes, I'm going to back you up on this. Fresh outta college with my VAX/VMS and Sun experience, I find myself in a System/38 shop.
Oh. My. God.
Absolutely nothing is the same. There is just barely a command line on the '38. The database is practically part of the OS. There is no "shell" as we know it. The programming languages (AFAIK, just COBOL and RPGIII) were as far as you could get from C-ish stuff, lacking anything remotely like printf() or even puts() for output, handling input through a faux-VSAM file interface.
Totally, totally alien. I caught on reasonably quickly, but what a culture shock. I learned an amazing amount in the first few months.
They don't even use freaking ASCII! Barbarians!
IBM minis are a whole different world from the Unix family. I can say with some certainty that going from Unix to Microsoft OSen is much less of a jump than Unix to mainframes or proprietary minis.
Re:Or... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 08:19 · Score: 0

"I can write primitive bash and perl scripts, and configure+administer a server. This makes me the only person in the group who can and makes me a 'linux expert' "

What always bothered me about the old-school IT guys, particularly the mainframe guys in one shop where I worked, is that they don't seem to be able to pick these skills up in a day or two.

It shouldn't even be possible for you to be the 'linux expert' because things like shell scripts and even perl aren't that hard to learn.

I would question the fundamental compentency of anyone who hasn't bothered to learn this stuff by now.
Re:Or... by blair1q · 2003-05-21 08:25 · Score: 1

The first operating system I ever learned was JCL for the 360. I was 14, and learning it and FORTRAN on my own by reading a book, with no access to hardware, until later on when I got into the school's computer classes.

I learned all of JCL (don't remember a thing off the top of my head, btw; it was over a quarter-century ago, after all...) and stopped using it almost as soon as I started, because the teacher came back from Comsat on the day after our weekly run and chewed me out because the Comsat ops had chewed her out because I had put a few cards in that did things like rack the printer and, iirc, reset the machine during our batch...oops...

I've been a good boy ever since. Honest.
Re:Or... by Vlad_the_Inhaler · 2003-05-21 08:27 · Score: 1

Unix versions has a learning-curve which is quite steep at the bottom. If you have no reason to get involved, most people simply do not bother. That is not a value-judgement, I am entirely self-taught in linux/unix and it really is a different world.

In my previous job, I had a couple of people ahead of me in the learning-curve and that got me going. Now I have to do it myself.

--
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Re:Or... by ebyrob · 2003-05-21 08:54 · Score: 2, Insightful

perl, vi, emacs or anything you'd expect on a nix box ... tcp/ip may be a possibility

What no vi??! You've got to be joking. I've yet to meet a platform without at least a couple crappy clones. Next you'll tell me regular expressions are not available and you're using a C compiler without ANSI support.

Seriously though, any system not supporting the tools you mention would seem halfway dead already. I'd figure the only thing such an environment would be good for is jumping to something more useful. Perhaps in some cases it really would be more feasible to consider emulation instead of porting and/or rewriting. But if the question of getting onto something a little more mainstream isn't even being asked, that sounds like a recipe for disaster. (ie: someone else will do it for you, and gain a huge competitive advantage)

You want experts on Rexx, JCL, RACF/ACF2 and such? Train them *after* you hire them. Additional languages (and platforms) should be easy enough to pick up for any halfway decent programmer or sys admin.

For the record:
z/OS has POSIX 2 support.
os370 blech! Keep it away!
MVS has at least POSIX 1 support.
etc? not sure...
Re:Or... by EnderWiggnz · 2003-05-21 09:28 · Score: 1

slight rant...

but why the hell hasnt EVE been ported to linux? blows emacs aways ...

--
... hi bingo ...
Re:Or... by belroth · 2003-05-21 09:29 · Score: 2, Informative

What no vi??! You've got to be joking. I've yet to meet a platform without at least a couple crappy clones.
Nope, not joking, never even heard rumours of vi on big iron, but you'll probably have xedit, which is a very powerful editor in it's own right. I easily prefer xedit to vi (yuk), it does some things better than emacs too. You're scripting language on any IBM platform is REXX - which is also your editor macro language.
Seriously though, any system not supporting the tools you mention would seem halfway dead already.
There are other tools, specific to the platforms, some better, some worse, most are just different.
The whole point is that it's different, if you can learn new stuff you can handle it - just don't expect it to be the same as anything else because it's not.

--
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
Re:Or... by Jay · 2003-05-21 09:42 · Score: 1

Actually - vi runs nicely under OMVS (Open MVS - basically a UNIX kernel ish interface to the MVS system with a complete posix userland & filesystem)

Different? Whoooooo yeah. I've been here 3 years and I still learn something basic every day.

--
You think emacs is evil?! You've never used VM's XEDIT have you?!! That's evil, baby!
Re:Or... by Amiga+Trombone · 2003-05-21 09:49 · Score: 1

Were you to try to do ANYTHING with a mainframe (I'm thinking s/390 or z/OS here) armed with the knowledge you mentioned you would be so horribly lost it wouldn't even be funny.

Oh, I don't know. Most shops are multi-platform these days, so most mainframes at minimum have a set of basic TCP/IP utilities on them so they can talk to the other platforms. You can do some neat tricks that way.

I once had a security admin throw a shit-fit at me for initiating jobs by building JCL execution decks in files on an HP-UX system, and then submiting them directly to an internal reader by ftping them over to the mainframe.

Of course, that bypasses the RACF security exits that check the authority of the user to submit a specific class of job. You can get at anything that way.

Boy, did they ever go ape-shit! ;-)
Re:Or... by awx · 2003-05-21 09:55 · Score: 1

:)

I've got a 4000/200 as my bedside table, a 3100/m10 keeping my feet warm and an 11/750 in the basement heating the house up :)

Lovely mixture of Ultrix, VMS and NetBSD/VAX

--
Feel that power? That's mah MOUSING FINGER
Re:Or... by belroth · 2003-05-21 11:12 · Score: 1

You can run vi on a mainframe? WHY? (shudders)
You think emacs is evil?! You've never used VM's XEDIT have you?!! That's evil, baby!
Actually I quite like emacs, but I prefer xedit anyway - I've used it for 10+ years on VM/CMS and MVS/TSO. :-)
btw you can run a very similar editor on windows or *nix - it's called The Hessling Editor (t.h.e.), and if you install rexx you have most of the capability you have under VM/MVS with a bit of rewriting to handle the different I/O mechanism (no EXECIO).

--
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
Re:Or... by fireboy1919 · 2003-05-21 11:15 · Score: 1

Perhaps you're right.

My experience with mainframes has been using ones that are designed to handle users. NOT user programs.

So all of the mainframes I've used have had all of these things I've mentioned as the main apps, and nearly all of them run Solaris.

I suppose there might be places where this isn't true, like I said. But I've always thought that there were more mainframes made for supporting users than there are for crunching numbers.

--
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Re:Or... by schatt · 2003-05-21 11:57 · Score: 2, Informative

Using sh as a normal user, /usr/sbin is not in your default path. ping on solaris is installed in /usr/sbin/ping, and depending on the security policies that your sysadmins have in place, may not be runnable by non-root users.
Solaris still correctly believes that not all tools belong in /bin. Fix your path to where the actual command is, and it will work.
Re:Or... by belroth · 2003-05-21 12:21 · Score: 2, Interesting

I wouldn't regard a Solaris box (even a big one) as a mainframe :-(
It may be cultural (coming from an IBM mainframe background) but I tend to think of mainframes as from IBM, Hitachi, Amdahl, Honeywell, ICL, Fujitsu etc - basically designed for reliability, ridiculous levels of connectivity and huge data throughput. I know a big Sun box is at least as powerful as a small (older?) mainframe but there you go. I suppose it's more a matter ot role than power?
Some of the brands I list may no longer exist (or been taken over) but I bet they're all still in use!

--
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
Re:Or... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 12:53 · Score: 0

Of course, most people who are admins on
mainframes are so clueless when it even comes
to stuff like telnet, ftp, etc. that they would
never run it anyway.

"You're not running that on my host!" - Mantra
of the blue-haired m/f admins.
Re:Or... by Brummund · 2003-05-21 13:40 · Score: 1

$ ls /usr/bin/ping /usr/sbin/ping: No such file or director
I've never seen the admin in person, but I suspect a fairly large tinfoil hat. :-)
Re:Or... by Brummund · 2003-05-21 13:42 · Score: 1

Argh. I hate not being able to use the clipboard. (Did I mention NT-only vpn-client?)

s/bin/sbin/g
Re:Or... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 14:17 · Score: 0

http://www.funsoft.com

Have fun.
Re:Or... by dogfart · 2003-05-21 15:38 · Score: 1

No prices mentioned. Is this in the hobbyist/student range?

--
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
Re:Or... by ces · 2003-05-21 16:36 · Score: 1

I suppose there might be places where this isn't true, like I said. But I've always thought that there were more mainframes made for supporting users than there are for crunching numbers.

There are boxes out there that do primarily number crunching for applications like weather forcasting, climate modeling, oil and gas exploration, pharmacutical reasearch, etc. But these tend to mostly be massive cluster arrays.

Mainframes like the big IBM, Unisys, Tandem, Hitachi, or Fijitsu beasts are primarily used for transaction processing or running massive batch jobs. Things like banks, stock exchanges, airline reservation systems, printing welfare checks for the state of California are applications where you will find mainframes.

While you might find big Sun boxes doing some of these things now days they really aren't as well suited to transaction and batch processing as "traditonal" mainframes.

Sort of like a semi vs. a freight train, both are industrial strength but they solve different problems.

--
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
Re:Or... by Doctor+Memory · 2003-05-21 16:57 · Score: 1

Dude, you have NOT used a mainframe! Mainframes are for shuffling huge amounts of bitage around. Need to calculate charges and print monthly billing statements for, oh, say Citibank? You'll need a mainframe. Same for, say, tracking daily account activity at Bank of America. You'll take hundreds of millions of transactions from a file, post them to a couple more files, adjust a couple million account balances, then spool several gig of print off to a print subsystem. And a mainframe will do this before anything that runs Solaris can finish sorting the first file.

Mainframes may be a bitch for interactive use (WYLBUR, anyone?), but for mass data processing, you can't touch them.

--
Just junk food for thought...
Re:Or... by ebyrob · 2003-05-21 17:50 · Score: 1

No rumors of vi? Anything with even POSIX 1 support can run something of the sort... IBM's website even mentions vi as a supported command for z/OS. Looks like MVS runs vi as well.

As for os370, do people even still use that? All I seem to find online about it are "Real Programmer" jokes.
Re:Or... by hughk · 2003-05-21 19:34 · Score: 1

The PDP-11 was a mini, but the VAX started as a "Departmental Computer" or midi even though there were also microVaxen. By the time you got on to the 6000 or bigger, they were clearly mainframes. I once worked with a 9000, and that was definitely mainframe material.

--
See my journal, I write things there
Re:Or... by hughk · 2003-05-21 19:37 · Score: 1

There have been some attempts at EVE/EDT style versions of Emacs. Not particulary wonderful though and really for the character mode terminal (or Xterm).
Some people were selling TPU workalikes for Unix, but I don't know what happened there. Certainly, there hasn't been any open source versions.

--
See my journal, I write things there
Re:Or... by hughk · 2003-05-21 19:40 · Score: 1

An 11/750, I would hate to see your utilities bill!!! To think that we used to run multiplayer trek battles on a 750, and in just 8MB of memory. My Vaxen have been relegated to the basement by the wife because of the noise. I do want to get the Alpha out again though.

--
See my journal, I write things there
Re:Or... by sgtrock · 2003-05-22 01:59 · Score: 1

"
Connectivity is probably still using SNA although tcp/ip may be a possibility.
"

Actually, TCP/IP is becoming common for mainframes at financial institutions. A lot of the newer software (less than 10 years old) either requires it, or runs better with it as the networking stack. I work for one of the Big 10 banks in the US. We've had it up and operational here ever since I started working here more than 7 years ago.

We've gone through a few iterations of interfaces since then. Our latest is several Cisco CIPs. Of course, purists will insist that a Cisco CIP isn't really ON the mainframe per se.... :)

Dupe / Similar article... by Chicane-UK · 2003-05-21 06:11 · Score: 1, Redundant

Thought this sounded familiar.

Same / similar story on Slashdot a few months ago :

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/26/221522 9&mode=thread&tid=126

--
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"

Re:Dupe / Similar article... by Chicane-UK · 2003-05-21 06:13 · Score: 1

And in other news, I am fucking blind.

Excuse me whilst I go and get my eyes tested.

--
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"

Yeah right ... by SuperDuG · 2003-05-21 06:11 · Score: 2, Insightful

At my school for the undergrad degree plan of "Computer Science Business" you _HAVE_ to learn COBOL. I hated every minute of it because it's a pain in the ass and antiquated and outdated. We have an entire department dedicated to the maintenance of IBM MVS 390 systems that basically run the entire school. Everything from registration to classes to payroll is handled through a slew of cobol programs and frontends all designed almost 20 years ago.

Basically the "Computer Science Business" degree plan is designed to make cobol monkeys for either the school, statefarm, kraft, or caterpillar who still rely heavily on cobol for day-to-day operations. What's the catch? In less than 10 years all the formentioned companies will be converted to either a .NET or Java platform to control all their operations. COBOL's last major reworking was done 18 years ago, it's time to switch to something new.

I hate cobol and I always will, if I ever see an VSAM or coding paragraph again I'll probably freak. I'd rather work at McDonalds than be a COBOL monkey. I don't think I'm alone with my views either, as this article proves. These systems are old, prone to crashes, and not supported by level one support anywhere. They have heavy maitenance price tags and it's for this reason that it is more economical for these companies to completely rewrite their systems. IBM Running on Linux will NOT save COBOL, it's a dead language, just some people still speak it.

Death to cobol you worthless language.

--
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed

Re:Yeah right ... by YrWrstNtmr · 2003-05-21 06:30 · Score: 2, Insightful

In less than 10 years all the formentioned companies will be converted to either a...

That's what they said 10-20 years ago, when those systems were new.
"Don't worry about that pesky 2 digit year thing. These systems will not be around that long."
Re:Yeah right ... by Zeinfeld · 2003-05-21 06:39 · Score: 1

I hated every minute of it because it's a pain in the ass and antiquated and outdated. We have an entire department dedicated to the maintenance of IBM MVS 390 systems that basically run the entire school.
Yep, old story. The problem is that people who don't understand computers believe that the cost of writing the program is the same as the cost of coding it. If you have the COBOL source and a reasonable idea of the architecture it is a lot easier to recode the application than it was to write it.
The big barrier is testing. But even that can be done reasonably efficiently. If you have a stack of cobol that hasn't been touched for twenty years the chances are it is costing you much more than the risk of a few bugs.
Ever wondered why it takes three times as long to check in on US Air than other airlines> The real reason they went bankrupt is they based their business on a twenty year old creaky IT infrastructure.

--
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Re:Yeah right ... by Pyrrhic+Victory · 2003-05-21 06:48 · Score: 1

I think I can top that. At my school by the time I have my master's degree in Theoretical Computer Science, I'll have taken a class in FORTRAN 77 (which I also was a teacher's assistant for), and three classes in IBM's System/370 assembler language plus a whole class of JCL. A few people I have talked to online have affectionately called my school "Timewarp U." Not to mention the fact that the other Computer Science students have to take a class in COBOL that is only taught by a professor who's degree is in geophysics.
Re:Yeah right ... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 06:50 · Score: 0

Perhaps it would indeed be best for all of us that you start flipping hamburgers, instead of inflicting us with your attemptat "improving" an accounting system.
Re:Yeah right ... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 07:13 · Score: 0

HA you were lucky!

My COBOL instructor was an astronomer!
Re:Yeah right ... by Arandir · 2003-05-21 07:38 · Score: 1

In less than 10 years all the formentioned companies will be converted to either a .NET or Java platform to control all their operations.

And this event will herald the end of civilization as we know it.

--
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Re:Yeah right ... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 07:53 · Score: 0

And "they" were half right -- Remember Y2K? Well, starting about about Y2K-5, a large number of mainframe systems were recoded for UNIX/Java/VisualBasic/etc, and another group was just ripped-n-replaced with newer "ERP" systems.

Because most of the COBOL code was "fixed" for Y2K with crappy hacks, there will be another day of reckoning around Y2K+10, and another huge group of those systems will go away.
Re:Yeah right ... by Moose4 · 2003-05-21 08:17 · Score: 5, Interesting

Now it's time to leave school and enter the real world...

I work for a financial institution. We run a fairly small IBM mainframe using OS/390. Our basic software for keeping up our loan accounts is 95% VS COBOL II and 5% Easytrieve Plus (a report writer language). Our files are straight VSAM--no databases to be found. Yes, it's antiquated, and yes, it works. We process information on about 150,000 loans nightly.

Several years ago, our CIO decided that mainframes are teh sux0r and that he wanted to replace it, and our COBOL loan systems, with "state-of-the-shelf" technology. He embarked on a four-year search to find a server-based system that could do what our users wanted and still process accruals, maintenance, and all the other assorted number-crunching on 150,000 loans, every night. Meanwhile, he decreed that all future development would be done using Microsoft technology--Windows NT/2000 as the platform, SQL Server as the database, Visual Basic 6.0 (!) as the language.

The first client/server development effort went twelve months over schedule and $2 million over budget. The second, in my programming group, only went in on time (but way overbudget) because we got some kick-ass VB6 programmers willing to work 75-hour weeks for 3 months. We quickly expanded to have a dizzying number of "data marts" and databases and report writers and little disconnected client/server apps...all of them fed by the mainframe. From nothing, we went to 300+ servers in 3 years at tremendous cost and tremendous headache.

Now, they are rewriting another bank system off COBOL--oh, but Microsoft no longer supports us using VB6/COM+, so now it's .NET. So all the staff have to be retrained on .NET, at great expense and time. (But not us mainframe toads, of course, everybody KNOWS you can't teach a COBOL dog new tricks, just fire them when they've served their usefulness.)

Meanwhile, six of us keep those COBOL loan applications purring like an old Chrysler 225 slant six engine. It's not pretty, but by God, it works. Day after day after day, with no real drama, the numbers crunch and the money rolls in. They could be doing everything new still on the mainframe with some of the newer mainframe tools--but basically, our upper management has decided that Green Screens Are Evil. That's the only reason we're spending the money we're spending.

Oh yeah, that four-year journey for a replacement system? Ended in failure. No NT/W2000-based distributed system out there could even get close to the performance we required. Unix systems came closer, but Unix is a four-letter word around here--it's Microsoft or bust, baby, we ARE Bill Gates' bitch!

There's no substitute for a mainframe and COBOL when you've got to move huge amounts of data around on mission-critical financial systems, and do it with near-perfect reliability. Distributed systems don't have the rock-solid reliability, yet. They may someday, but not now.

So welcome to reality, Junior. COBOL isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Better pay attention in class! Either that, or learn to say, "Would you like a McTurnover with that?"

--
"Settle down, Beavis. We've got an experiment to do."
Re:Yeah right ... by ar32h · 2003-05-21 08:34 · Score: 1

Unless something better comes along (No, Unix/Linux does not even come close) State Farm and Caterpillar will continue using mainframes for many years to come, why?
Because the costs resulting from downtime on the comparatively unstable open systems platforms is far greater then the cost of service contracts.

Behind most fortune 500 companies there are several mainframes, and they do not keep buying them just to spend money or to run "legacy" applications.
Not coincidently, most fortune 500 companies use java. Java has been available on the mainframe for quite some time now.

Sf and cat both know where to use and do use Unix and windows servers, passing email and serving web pages, but the database work? mainframe all the way.
Oracle on Sun does not even come close to the power of DB2 on IBM zSeries.
The Illinois university computer systems tend to be heavily mainframe based because they were on the leading edge of computer adoption back when mainframe was the only option.
So long as they continue to work I doubt that they will be replaced any time soon. With the state budget crunch they better keep working because there is no money to replace them. (wacky Illinois finance paperwork for state agencies: continuing expensive service contracts is easy but purchasing cheap new hardware is hard).
Free bit of trivia: Illinois university system programmers helped make IBM's mainframe OSs what they are today, just as IBM contributes code to Linux, so the ISUs' contributed code to IBM and the mainframe community at large.
Re:Yeah right ... by SuperDuG · 2003-05-21 08:50 · Score: 1

Pay attention you say??? Ahh yes so the truth comes out, I did pay attention and I actually got an A in all the cobol classes (yes there are more than one ...) and now I'm done. I learned basically a little portion of everything COBOL can do (it is actually quite a limited language). And the sadest part of it all ... I know exactly what you are talking about when you say everything is stored in VSAM on a 390 system. I even know that my instructor would have your ass for calling 85-cobol COBOL II, even though they're the same damned thing.
I never said I couldn't maintain a COBOL based mainframe system with enough training in the company's systems and procedures for coding, I said I would rather work at McDonalds. As you already know there is absolutely nothing sexy about COBOL programming. It is basically the completed stereotype of what a computer job is. Constantly looking through a green on black screen of text (unless you were cool enough to change the colors and make all the other geeks jealous).
I've even seen COBOL in a production enviroment enough to see that it is not anything near what I want to do with my future. The systems are sound, I'll grant you that, but they are antiquated and stupid end user is becoming more and more afraid of the old keyboard everyday. GUI frontends to mainframes are nothing more than half ass hacks. The cost of maintaining the mainframes will be their ultimate demise.
I do feel your pain though, really I do ...

--
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Re:Yeah right ... by conteXXt · 2003-05-21 09:16 · Score: 1

Ha mine were old COBOL programmers.

These guys were hilarious.

They drank like fish (I guess that's why they taught rather than did), and took astronomically long to help debug a program.

I guess they were busy doing up mock identification divisions for my assembler programs to get their heads around it.

--
The truth about Led Zep should never be told on /. (Karma suicide ensues)
Re:Yeah right ... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 11:46 · Score: 0

Regarding last major reworking 18 years ago comment. Take a look at www.cobolstandards.com A new COBOL was approved September 2002 and published by ISO with some object oriented stuff being added into it. Pay attention in class son, you might learn something that'll help you.

Memories by Infernon · 2003-05-21 06:12 · Score: 2, Interesting

My entry into the IT world started at the fresh age of nineteen as the third shift operator for a Wang VS mainframe. While my previous experience was only with the Windows OS, the company that I worked for was very willing to hire someone who was green as long as they were willing to learn.
When the WANG died (Y2K!), they moved the application over to the Win32 side of things, but I was transferred to work with the IBM MVS mainframe that was used for another portion of the business. I still understand very little about the job that I did (mainly due to the ease of use that the Beta42 scheduled provided!), but remember hearing of how people that knew or were willing to learn the ins and outs of the mainframe were so few and far between. Eventually, I moved on to bigger and better things, but the mainframe still lives to this day and I've heard that they're having trouble finding decent operators:)

Aerospace is seeing this... by Misch · 2003-05-21 06:12 · Score: 2, Interesting

Aerospace is seeing this too. With the loss of a second Space Shuttle, there's a lot of push to have the US go back to rocket-based space travel. Well, what they forget is that we've lost a lot of that rocketry talent over the years to retirement/old age/death/whatnot... it would be pretty expensive to make the transition back.

--

--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs

Re:Aerospace is seeing this... by PsibrII · 2003-05-21 16:11 · Score: 1

Maybe they'll have to get those guys who worked on the delta clipper into the loop after they've fired the ones who crashed it, the ones who did the faster, better, cheap, fail at the last moment probes, and the people who decided eco friendly foam the breaks off and rips up the heating tiles was a good idea. By then, you'll have to layoff the 80% who are only mildly incompetant. And after that, you'll have a few dozen left who might be able to help build a new space agency.

We are not dead, we just by Archfeld · 2003-05-21 06:12 · Score: 4, Insightful

moved into more lucrative positions. Match my current salary and I'll go back to hexdump processing, IMS MTO, CICS batch, MVS/TSO, JES3/2, VM, REXX, DOS/VSE you name it. I've been a mainframe/mid-range support in nearly every environment around, I can even roll a VTAM sub-area :)
But M$ exchange cluster design and management pays MUCH better.

--
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?

Re:We are not dead, we just by Mandi+Walls · 2003-05-21 10:00 · Score: 1

ay, 'cause you sold your soul.
Re:We are not dead, we just by Archfeld · 2003-05-21 15:26 · Score: 1

NAH, my soul is GPL'd, it only gets updated and added to :)

--
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?

Help Wanted by American+AC+in+Paris · 2003-05-21 06:12 · Score: 5, Funny

Mainframe? Pah!

Mainframe Techies are a dime a dozen--the real challenge is finding competent PDP8/E techies these days!

Plunk your modern so-called "computer whiz" in front of one, and their first reaction is invariably one of the following:

"Why are there so many power switches?"
"Where's the keyboard?"
"Where's the monitor?"
"Where's the mouse?"
"Why does it sound like it's about to generate lift?"
"Does it support themes?"
"Let's see...'HCF' instruction? Hwa? Oh, I get it--Hardware ConFiguration!" *click* AIEEEEEEEEE!
"'Switch Register'? Sorry, I never register anything. It's a government ploy to learn my phone number and address!"

--

Obliteracy: Words with explosions

Re:Help Wanted by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 06:29 · Score: 1, Funny

HCF - Halt and Catch Fire
MLD - Move and Lose Data
RST - Read and Stretch Tape
CVR - Convert to Roman Numerals...
Re:Help Wanted by JargonScott · 2003-05-21 06:34 · Score: 1

I had to build a PDP-8 from scratch in a class at IU. It was suprisingly interesting to play around with.

It's one of the few times I've ever felt like "I" did something with a computer, instead of just running other peoples' software, on other peoples' hardware.

--
Nuke Gay Whales for Jesus.
Re:Help Wanted by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 08:00 · Score: 0

SLP - Sharpen light pen
RWRT - Read and Write while Ripping Tape

"mostly in their 40s" -- oh no! by fmaxwell · 2003-05-21 06:16 · Score: 4, Insightful

Cobol programers, still needed for legacy applications, are mostly in their 40s.

Oh no! People in their 40s will only want to remain in the work force for another 20 years or so. What will the companies do then? Train people? Not in the U.S.! All employees must be hired with all needed skills. We wouldn't want to spend money training them because that investment would be wasted when we laid them off and shipped their job over to India.

Nobody gets upset that most CEOs are in their 50s. No one is concerned that corporate attorneys are usually over 40. You don't see a panic because the average charter boat captain is in his 40s.

Working in the computer field is like living the movie Logan's Run. Once you are out of your twenties, everyone from management to your fellow tech workers thinks your time is over.

Or is it simpler than that? Maybe companies realize that they can underpay and overwork young, naive, single people but that people in their 40's with experience, families, and responsibilities will expect fair pay, benefits, and working conditions.

Re:"mostly in their 40s" -- oh no! by Ian_Bailey · 2003-05-21 07:21 · Score: 2, Insightful

The difference is that with CEOs, there are a whole bunch of executives waiting to climb the corporate ladder, just a litle bit younger. This progresses all the way down to the interns, fresh out of college/university.

Law firms have lots of younger junior partners just itching for a step up, and paralegals and other staff behind them.

But who's waiting to take over for the COBOL programmers? No one now, no one coming soon, and no one in the forseeable future. That's the problem.
Re:"mostly in their 40s" -- oh no! by fmaxwell · 2003-05-21 08:02 · Score: 3, Insightful

But who's waiting to take over for the COBOL programmers? No one now, no one coming soon, and no one in the forseeable future. That's the problem.

If COBOL programmers were paid as handsomely as executives and corporate attorneys, you would find plenty of people eager to learn COBOL.

This is not some big mystery. Why would someone in the IT field go that direction when COBOL programmers are paid more poorly, have less opportunity for advancement, and generally do less rewarding work? It's like paying teachers $20K per year and wondering why more people aren't getting teaching degrees.

The pay is the problem.
Re:"mostly in their 40s" -- oh no! by Moose4 · 2003-05-21 08:23 · Score: 3, Insightful

Mod this guy up.

Where I work, their idea of "retraining" us COBOL jockeys was to send us to MCSD 5-day cram refresher classes--never mind that none of us had coded VB6 before in our lives--and then expect us to get an MCSD certification, without EVER using the stuff in the wild. Once they realized that we couldn't do that, all training was withdrawn. Anything we want we have to get on our own, which is OK, that's the way things go--but we won't be given any opportunity to actually use the stuff unless we take a 50% pay cut to go to work as a "junior" programmer somewhere else.

Meanwhile, we see MCSDs, .NET and VB6/COM+ specialists, brought in off the street at higher pay grades and more money than 20-year veteran employee COBOL programmers. Unless they're on H-1Bs, in which case they get brought in at $20k under what even we're making.

If somebody is smart enough to be a good COBOL programmer for 15 years, they can learn new tools, even ones radically different. But instead companies will throw their older workers away--even though they're the ones that know the business processes--and bring in younger ones that they can work 90 hours a week and/or underpay.

--
"Settle down, Beavis. We've got an experiment to do."
Re:"mostly in their 40s" -- oh no! by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 14:48 · Score: 0

[What "companies" do]

I cannot help but notice that people are in a company for 15-20 years, but still do not find themselves in a position to make these decisions.

Yet they feel comfortable complaining about the decisions made by the ones who are in that position.
Re:"mostly in their 40s" -- oh no! by fmaxwell · 2003-05-22 02:06 · Score: 2, Insightful

I cannot help but notice that people are in a company for 15-20 years, but still do not find themselves in a position to make these decisions.

Yet they feel comfortable complaining about the decisions made by the ones who are in that position.

If management is "comfortable" criticizing the work of those people who have chosen a career in software engineering, why shouldn't software engineers criticize the work (i.e., decisions) of those who have chosen a career in management? Many software engineers are in that field because they enjoy the work. They don't aspire to be managers. Criticizing them because they have not become managers is invalid.

COBOL on Linux by Mark+Hanson · 2003-05-21 06:17 · Score: 3, Informative

Linux ain't System/36 or MPE or any other mainframe OS. And show me one linux app that's written in COBOL.

Shameless plug: Acucorp, Inc. makes COBOL development/runtime systems that run on pretty much any UNIX-like system, including Linux. We have lots of customers running on Linux from plain old PCs on up to the IBM S/390.

We had a booth at a recent LinuxWorld. Lots of people would walk by, do a double-take, and ask us, "COBOL on Linux?" Yep, believe it!

Re:COBOL on Linux by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 07:09 · Score: 0

Yup, Acucorp is some really nifty stuff. I was able to get a client's core app moved from an old flakey SCO box over to a nice new Linux system in a little over two weeks.

Not a dupe, dope by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 06:17 · Score: 0

*Bzzzt* wrong ... RTFA.

Re:Not too surprising really; What if? by cashisking · 2003-05-21 06:18 · Score: 0

What if someone had an extra million and a half US$ lying around, and decided to pick up a T-Rex, just to train a team of mainframers? How much time are we talking about? My only experience with a mainframe came at BMC, where I was used to help a group of mainframers connect up to the Big Iron through a PC running Japanese OS/2. Loved that green screen.

Europe by boskonijn · 2003-05-21 06:19 · Score: 1

I am in my mid 20's and back when I was in college we had 3 years of Cobol, some Fortran 77 and 99 and quite a bit of AIX Unix on an RS-6000 (was a linux addict even before then). The main purpose was to provide good programmers for the millenium fix which affected quite a bit old finance programs on mainframes. The funny thing was that in my first year we only had 70 people starting in computer science (that was 1996). That summer newspapers started talking about the millenium problems that could occur and the amount of money companies were willing to spent in order to get their old software fixed. The next year they had over 300 applicants! I'm not sure what the situation in the US was at the time, but I assume more companies over there had already switched to WinNT and most universities had stopped teaching those ancient programming languages... Looks like I might be able to use those skills after all.

Don' t Go There by DeltaOne18 · 2003-05-21 06:20 · Score: 2, Insightful

I used to be a COBOL programmer for an insurance firm. It wasn't by choice. I started out on a Java web app team and got transfered. I must say that there was a general lack of good technical knowledge about mainframe programming at the company (it didn't help they laided off some of the best guys) which made it even hard to do my job. Developing on the mainframe is much different, I find it more mondane and boring, then working with modern PCs and OO languages.

I am sure some people like it but I hated it and had to leave the company to get away from it since no one would transfer to my position.

--Kurt A web developer's weblog

solution by ih8apple · 2003-05-21 06:20 · Score: 2, Interesting

The solution to the shortage of mainframe programmers is obvious if you follow what I've been doing for the past 7 years. More of my work than ever is involved with integrating Java, C, or Visual C++/VB with mainframe applications. Whether through Screen Scraping, MQ Integration (like MQSI), CORBA, CICS, TCP sockets, or other mechanisms, a larger percentage of corporate bread-and-butter applications are living longer on the mainframe and extending their life through integration with web servers or application servers. As the COBOL teams die off, corporations will stop extending the mainframe's functionality on the mainframe itself and will continue to extend the functionality on the other tiers of the applications (on WebSphere, .NET Server or wherever). Almost all of the projects I've done started out as a stupid GUI front-end on Windows or a Web browser for an existing green screen application and then grew to include a lot of business logic and data storage on the non-mainframe tiers.

--

Why do I h8 apple?

Not a dupe by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 06:20 · Score: 0

Totally different subject matter d00d - RTFA before engaging mouth.

Oh yeah, there was an article about Linux a couple of months ago too - lotta dupes since then, cowboy?

How to get new mainframe techies by Jay+Maynard · 2003-05-21 06:21 · Score: 5, Informative

As others have noted, the biggest hurdle is that there's no good way for an interested geek to learn firsthand about mainframe systems and OSes. While Hercules takes care of the hardware, at least enough for people to run something to learn on, the same isn't true for the operating system. Modern IBM OSes are hideously expensive, for an individual (unless you're Bill the Gates), and there's been some persistent comments that they won't license them on Hercules anyway (although I have no direct knowledge of this, either way).

I've been advocating a hobbyist license for IBM OSes for use by individuals with Hercules for some time now. There's a white paper at http://www.conmicro.cx/ibmhobbyistlic.html. Aside from a few curmudgeons, and aside from the folks at IBM who make the decisions, the reaction I've gotten to this paper has been uniformly positive. I believe that it would help slow the slide, at least.

In the meantime, the interested can get a running copy of the last public-domain version of MVS from the CBT Tape web page, which is a great resource for the mainframe community in general.

--
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!

Re:How to get new mainframe techies by m11533 · 2003-05-21 07:57 · Score: 1

It should go without saying, but IBM OSes have been very expensive since the dawn of time (well, the start of the computer industry). The pricing has always be linked to the hardware costs, and those have not changed much in the big iron mainframe world (well, you get a great deal more power for the same big dollars now, but no small dollar machines). I do think the suggestion of some form of "hobbiest" license makes a lot of sense, particularly since with the tremendous power of today's PC hardware it would not be unreasonable for someone to implement a full emulation of the mainframe on it for training, development, and test purposes.
Re:How to get new mainframe techies by Jay+Maynard · 2003-05-21 09:24 · Score: 1

It should go without saying, but IBM OSes have been very expensive since the dawn of time (well, the start of the computer industry).

Actually, IBM didn't charge for its programs of any flavor until 1969, and for its operating systems until 1979 - and then the SP (system product) versions of the OSes were optional, and provided side-by-side with the public domain versions. The non-SP versions were in the public domain, and you can legally get copies today for use with Hercules. In fact, you could even order the last public domain version of MVS from IBM until March 2001! They'd send it to you on 38 tapes if you ordered everything.

Practically speaking, nobody ran the public domain OSes after about 1985 or so, but they were still floating around.

--
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Re:How to get new mainframe techies by Amiga+Trombone · 2003-05-21 10:04 · Score: 1

I've been advocating a hobbyist license for IBM OSes for use by individuals with Hercules for some time now. There's a white paper at http://www.conmicro.cx/ibmhobbyistlic.html. Aside from a few curmudgeons, and aside from the folks at IBM who make the decisions, the reaction I've gotten to this paper has been uniformly positive. I believe that it would help slow the slide, at least.

That's a really great idea! It's unfortunate you haven't been able to get a response out of IBM yet.

They really don't have anything to lose. It's not like a you can take OS/390 and install it on a competitors machine. I don't think anyone like Amdahl is still in the business of building a IBM mainframe compatable machine.

Wonder why you're getting blown off? Have you gotten any explainations?

A Non Issue by tealover · 2003-05-21 06:22 · Score: 3, Insightful

There are always a level of IT employees who didn't go to school and get a CS degree. It may be a clerical worker trying to move up. A painter trying to hop on the bandwagon. For many of them, they don't really know the technology out there.

Employers target these people and train them. I know. I was one of them.

I went to a school called Chubb in New Jersey, which is run by the Chubb Insurance company. It was originally an inhouse training development center for Chubb so they could train new employees on their mainframe systems. It got very popular and they opened it up to outside companies to make a few bucks. It has gotten very popular and is located in several states now.

The companies who need mainframe workers know about schools like Chubb. The only thing that has changed at Chubb over the years as it became less of a Chubb training center is that they have to cater to the people who do know about current technology, so they also offer non-mainframe curriculum. But as far as I know (haven't been there in 10 years), mainframe is still their bread and butter.

--
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to

Re:A Non Issue by easter1916 · 2003-05-21 08:22 · Score: 1

At least two community colleges in the St. Louis area offered Associates Degrees that focused on AS/400 (I know, midrange not mainframe) technology until last year. My wife availed of one and is very gainfully employed now... I'm glad that there are organizations out there that recognize that heat and flash is no substance for skills that actually result in people being hired.

I Eat Dill Pickles by Mouth+of+Sauron · 2003-05-21 06:25 · Score: 1, Funny

Commence Freaking. Thanks.

India to the rescue? by Tablizer · 2003-05-21 06:25 · Score: 3, Insightful

I espect India to set up mainframe training centers and train hundreds of thousands in COBOL, JCL, etc.

They have a habit of showing up at our doors for that kind of thing, whether we need them or not.

--
Table-ized A.I.

Re:India to the rescue? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 06:39 · Score: 0

JCL isn't written, it's copied
Re:India to the rescue? by Jay+Maynard · 2003-05-21 06:58 · Score: 1

//SLASHDOT JOB (5161A011,1A11),'SLASHDOT COMMENT',CLASS=R,MSGCLASS=X, // MSGLEVEL=(1,1),NOTIFY=MYNRJR //COMMENT EXEC PGM=IEBGENER //SYSIN DD DUMMY //SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT=* //SYSUT2 DD SYSOUT=* //SYSUT1 DD DATA,DLM=$$ Baloney! I wrote this from scratch, sitting at my terminal...er... web browser. It's not hard, just inflexible and unforgiving. $$ //

--
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Re:India to the rescue? by Tablizer · 2003-05-21 06:59 · Score: 1

JCL isn't written, it's copied

But you have to know it when things go wrong like you have to generitize hard-wired drive designations or increase size allocations without busting the "chunk math". Weird stuff that JCL.

--
Table-ized A.I.

Gouge? by Gonoff · 2003-05-21 06:26 · Score: 1

Then you are stupid!

--
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.

Older mainframe operators = Good by TFloore · 2003-05-21 06:27 · Score: 1

Think about this for a minute. This is actually a good thing.

One of the main selling points with mainframes is stability. You want to have experienced reliable people maintaining, administering, and programming your mainframe. Specifically, you do *not* want a fresh-out-of-college kid who still hasn't learned about bounds checking and other safe programming practices. Okay, not such a problem with COBOL, but you still want people that have matured in the industry, not someone that thinks "large, long project" is a 1,000-LOC project that he had to work with for an entire 15-week semester.

Yes, there's a problem if your entire staff is going to be retiring in the next 5 years. You'll have some definite training troubles for system-specific issues.

But if you want to keep your mainframe stable and reliable, you need to have staff that are properly experienced. And that usually means a minimum age limit.

Of course, "experienced stable people" can easily be in their 30s, so there's more than just that going on here. But there is a strong correlation between age, experience, and reliability.

--
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?

Re:Older mainframe operators = Good by swit · 2003-05-22 10:51 · Score: 1

I'm amused when discussing computer stability with people who have had experience only on PCs.
I tell them that if the last mainframe I installed had crashed only ONCE *IN A YEAR* I would have been aghast at its unreliability.

(These are the same people who gasp when I mention that I consider systems to be "small" if they have
only 100,000 lines of code. And that's typed in lines, which DO NOT include in the count such
things like INCLUDED "canned" code and/or headers!)

SWIT

Sysadmining Mainframe by wodon · 2003-05-21 06:29 · Score: 1

At my work we run mixed mainframe/pc environment.
No-one in the IT department has any form of official Tech qualifications, as is often the case with mainframe admins(although the manager went of a typing course in the 70's).
I think the difference is that the managers have realised that to keep the system operating people need to be trained up. Myself and the other early 20's Techs were all brought on board aged 18 from high school (in the uk, hence 18) and we all had to leard the mainframe ops before we could touch the rest of the network.
They may be based on an old system but ours is constantly being upgraded and I have learned to love the old workhorses.
I once asked the Senior mainframe guy how often these things crash and he just looked at me in utter confusion. There had been no unplanned downtime for the last 8 years and even that was due to someone switching off the internal UPS just before a powercut!
There should be more Companies willing to take on intelligent people and train them up on the job, as often this is the only way to get more people onto more obscure systems.

They may just be big calculators, but buy can they calculate

I'd better go, this mouse thingy if starting to frighten me ;-)

--
It's My Tea and I'll Drink it if I Want To!

Cobol as an Environment by repetty · 2003-05-21 06:29 · Score: 1

If you've coded C/C++ but haven't worked -- really worked -- with Cobol, then you probably aren't qualified to speak on this topic.

Cobol isn't just a language... as a working environment it provides a whole lot more support for software development, data sharing, and group collaboration techniques than any of you realize.

I took a Cobol class ten years ago and messed with it at work for a while. I respect the hell out of it.

A lot of you bigots need to realize that your unemployement checks are almost certainly processed with Cobol.

Don't bite the hand that feeds you.

--Richard

Re:Cobol as an Environment by terrywin · 2003-05-21 07:38 · Score: 1

"A lot of you bigots need to realize that your
unemployement checks are almost certainly
processed with Cobol."

This is most certainly true. In addition,
MOST of the worlds largest bank and insurance
industries run their back-end systems on
mainframe COBOL. We're talking *millions* of
transactions a day being processed, analyzed,
stored, etc. These systems often have robotic
tape systems, fibre connections, etc. Maybe
they could be replaced by a cluster of BEOWOLF
clusters, but I doubt it ;-)

COBOL's been pronounced dead many, many times.
Neither it nor mainframes are going away any
time soon :)

Terry
(one of those *aging* COBOL programmers)

Bowie J. Poag == Arrogant by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 06:30 · Score: 0

I'd rather take a "Long Duck Dong" who knows very little running the mainframe...than having your arrogant, always-right, quirky, know-it-all attitude constantly reminding people why you should be paid more than anyone else

RTFA by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 06:32 · Score: 0

What, you mean the one actually mentioned in the piece above? Where it says See also this earlier post on the mainframe-operator labor pool. First, no it's a different issue, and second, don't you even read the item - let alone the article - before posting?

Where do you find the mainframe jobs? by jms · 2003-05-21 06:32 · Score: 1

No, really. I've been scouring the job ads for nearly 6 months, and in spite of all the endless hype over mainframe Linux under VM, I haven't found a single job posting for a VM systems programmer.

Are there specialized job boards? Am I missing something?

IBM and Mainframes by caffeinex36 · 2003-05-21 06:35 · Score: 1

Yeah, IBM is actually PUSHING people off of mainframes.....but pushing them to AIX!@!#

If you have a mainframe and a suck-each-other-off relationship with IBM (as many companies do) your most likely being railroaded into a few p650's with AIX.

It baffles me how this is a GOOD thing...really...almost like bad to worse!

My comments our solely my opinion and do not reflect views of anything blah blah blah.....

How to Tell a Mainframe Techie by AtariAmarok · 2003-05-21 06:35 · Score: 2, Funny

10. They are those nice 80 year old men in the clean white coats...

9. "If you can't submit the program in batch mode, it just ain't worth submitting"

8. They're the guys with spot welders in their briefcase.

7. Compared to what they are used to, any PC or Mac is a portable computer

6. They know EBDIC, but to them edlin is a newfangled thing.

5. They know DB. They don't know Debian

4. They don't trust any machine under 3000 lbs.

3. They come home from a hard day's work with hands covered in soot and burnt oil.

2. The telltale COBOL on the resume

1. They knew all about dangling chads and punch cards without having to read Slate

--
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.

Re:How to Tell a Mainframe Techie by Rick.C · 2003-05-21 07:28 · Score: 3, Funny

10) They view a PC/MAC as a dumb terminal "with this neat copy/paste thingie."

9) They know EBCDIC and are totally annoyed that numbers sort before letters in ASCII.

8) They are also annoyed that PC keyboards use the new-line key as ENTER.

7) "Fiber optic cable" means a 36-pair trunk. Anything less is just a device jumper.

6) They think that less than eight fiber paths to any device constitutes an I/O bottleneck.

5) They laugh at COBOL programmers. To their faces.

4) The largest program they ever wrote was 12K. The coolest was 160 bytes.

3) They know what the "National" character set is.

2) They wince at a 1.2-million line core dump, but they're glad they don't have to print it like they did in the old days.

1) They can read that core dump like it was source code.

--
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
Re:How to Tell a Mainframe Techie by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 08:01 · Score: 0

I wanna be a mainframe technie. I learned COBOL specifically for bragging rights. It hasn't worked, and now my brain is full.

So are chickens... by emo+boy · 2003-05-21 06:36 · Score: 0

a dying breed of course....

http://perso.club-internet.fr/chuot/humour/poulet. jpg

--
___ Shout Central - Crushes your nuts!

Talk to IBM by MAXOMENOS · 2003-05-21 06:36 · Score: 1

They're the ones doing this work, out of a lab in Oregon.

--
Finding God in a Dog

Yes! by BitwizeGHC · 2003-05-21 06:39 · Score: 1

Because fixed-point math is impossible in those languages!

--
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!

Re:Yes! by jedidiah · 2003-05-21 07:10 · Score: 1

Horsesh*t.

"fixed-point" == integer

--
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Re:Yes! by BitwizeGHC · 2003-05-21 07:45 · Score: 1

My comment was intended to be sarcastic.

The poster of the parent asserted that COBOL and RPG were the only trustworthy languages for financial work because all other languages introduced rounding errors in their floating-point implementations. While that is the nature of the beast when it comes to binary floating point, my point was, you don't *use* floating point when dealing with money; you do all your calculations internally as integral numbers of cents, say, and then stick your decimal point in the right place when formatting the output. That is essentially what COBOL and RPG do anyway.

I'm to understand that a lot of financial institutions rely on Smalltalk for their newer applications...

--
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!

Chicken and Egg Problem? by emo+boy · 2003-05-21 06:40 · Score: 1

No..this is a chicken and egg problem..
http://perso.club-internet.fr/chuot/humour/poulet. jpg

--
___ Shout Central - Crushes your nuts!

Re:Chicken and Egg Problem? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 07:55 · Score: 0

Thanks for reminding me of the most entertaining news story in years :)

Bwwaaa waaah !!! Labor Shortage !!! by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 06:44 · Score: 0

Well then freaking raise wages. See
how long there's a "shortage".

Free Mainframe Emulator - Hercules by Rick.C · 2003-05-21 06:46 · Score: 3, Informative

For all those who complain that they can't learn IBM S/370 at home on their PCs, go here and look down the right-hand side for Hercules links.

Cbttape.org is the mainframe version of open-source, but without any GPL license nonsense. We share freely or not at all!

Note that the 1978 version of IBM's MVS 3.8 operating system is public domain. This is what's included with Hercules. Source code is also freely available. The difference between MVS 3.8 and today's OS/390 is about the same as the difference between Win95 and WinXP. I.E., Win95 would give you a pretty good understanding of Windows, and WinXP just builds on that.

There is a cookbook installation version with a step-by-step guide for neophytes - the MVS 3.8 Turnkey CD - follow the Voelker Bandke link.

Good luck, and when you're in Dinosaur Land - avoid the meat-eaters!

--
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford

Re:Free Mainframe Emulator - Hercules by finkployd · 2003-05-21 08:09 · Score: 2, Informative

The difference between MVS 3.8 and today's OS/390 is about the same as the difference between Win95 and WinXP. I.E., Win95 would give you a pretty good understanding of Windows, and WinXP just builds on that.

Having both installed MVS 3.8 on hercules and worked as a sysprog on a very large OS/390 for a few years I'm going to have to really disagree with you on that. Sure some of the concepts are similar but almost nothing you learn on the MVS system is really going to carry over effectivly. WAY too much has changed.

Finkployd
Re:Free Mainframe Emulator - Hercules by Rick.C · 2003-05-21 12:50 · Score: 1

Granted, I haven't installed Hercules, but I read through the step-by-step instructions. I also installed and maintained MVS 3.8 on a 3158 and a 3168-MP back in the day and those instructions brought back some not-too-pleasant memories. IBCDASDI - ughh. After twenty years of being a vendor SE and not being allowed to get my hands dirty, I am now a happy sysprog again. I found that although many things -had- changed, the basics had not.
For those that are used to a hierarchical file system, VTOCs and catalogs present a learning opportunity. And CKD (count-key-data) hardware can be pretty neat, especially when you're doing your own channel programs.
Hercules will teach you JCL. That's a non-optional requirement for any junior sysprog. It will also teach you S/370 assembler. Yeah, IEV90 is not HLASM, but it was good enough to assemble JES2, wasn't it?
HASP/JES2. Now there's a learning experience in itself! You young-uns who want to learn S/370 assembler - study the JES2 source code. Write some JES2 exits under Hercules and get them to run. That'll look good on your resume.
One of the most useful and blatantly obvious things that I wish the Windows crowd would learn is to use two- or four-byte tokens for system calls and return codes. "SetForegroundWindow" could be shortened to x'0010040C' e.g. and the savings from doing this for every function would cut out a lot of bloat, both in the space it takes and the cycles required to parse it. X'0010040C' is a couple of direct-offset table fetches and a branch.
And SMP - was it SMP/E yet in 3.8? Doesn't matter, the concept's the same.
Oh well, here's a list of things that you can learn from MVS 3.8 that would get you hired as a junior mainframe sysprog today:
JCL - batch job control language

S/370 assembler language

JES2 - how to set it up and tune it

SMP - for applying patches

IBM utility program usage

sysgen - how to configure control units and devices (it's a way different interface now, but you need to know the concepts

tapes - they're a lot more useful on a mainframe

PDS (partitioned data sets) usage and formats

catalog usage and utilities (IDCAMS)

TSO - install FSE (Full-Screen Editor) from CBT to make TSO useful

Now for the good part - all of the current IBM manuals are available for free here.
So go hang around at CBTtape.org, and above all, have fun!

--
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford

Ugh: T-Rex? by Ted+Stoner · 2003-05-21 06:46 · Score: 3, Funny

I am constantly being ribbed by a younger guy here about being an old ex-mainframe guy. He is always going on about how there were dinosaurs crawling about when I was programming on them. Now IBM comes out with a new model called "T-Rex". I can feel a new verbal assault coming on ...

Couldn't IBM have call it something like Mainframe Extreme or something a bit more trendy?

Re:Ugh: T-Rex? by easter1916 · 2003-05-21 08:15 · Score: 1

I would have thought that with your superior experience and exposure to advanced mainframe technologies, you'd put that young whippersnapper back in his box? I'm serious. Most of these "all I know is Java" types really don't know much at all about designing highly-available, large-volume transaction systems. This isn't a troll. I started out on large midrange systems and am currently doing J2EE development myself.

Learn by doing it... by dark-br · 2003-05-21 06:48 · Score: 2, Insightful

The problem is that no one teaches mainframe operations in schools, you basically need to learn by being dropped into it - and not screwing up everything. Fewer and fewer businesses are willing to invest in promising new talent to learn these legacy systems, but their own mainframe gurus are retiring or dying off - so eventually this corporations will 'bleed out' skill-wise.

And no, the mainframe cannot be replaced by a client-server solution. I listened to this moron chant throughout school - mainframes are not dead. REALITY CHECK - there are just some applications where a mainframe makes more sense. Mainframes can handle enormous amounts of data without having to break it up for a cluster, or without being bogged down with I/O like most client-server type solutions. Mainframes are great when you need to handle databases with tons of information in it - and you need to consistantly dig through it. Most machines cannot handle it, and will buckle. Mainframes almost never buckle, unless you are testing new stuff on them (naughty newbie - that's what a test LPAR is for) or you do funky things to them.

please mod parent down by theuglykid · 2003-05-21 06:52 · Score: 2, Insightful

I didn't gain any experience from school, because most schools don't seem to value mainframes anymore. This is probably because server vendors and their software vendors are more aggressively seeking institutions of higher education. These vendors seem to have more throw away money and more "progressive" marketing strategies by getting students "hooked" on to their own products(MS is really good at this game) early in their educations. This is great because some tof the graduates of today will be the managers of tomorrow and will hold the purse strings of their IT departments. WHat do you think a manager will purchase if given an opportunity? The tools (s)he's already familiar with. What will a forward thinking manager purchase when faced with a need to upgrade the system? Some will survey what the prospective employees are already familiar with (possibly to cut training costs). I gained my experience by never turning down an opportunity to work (and thereby learn). My future is secure.

I am a 25 year old programmer who spends 96% of the time working on OS/390 mainframes using JCL and MVS COBOL. Any other time is divided between Java and VB for special apps.

The team I work with (5 of us, total) is officially dubbed the "Legacy" team. Our total IT department is comprised of roughly 80 employees (so you can see how few are able to do or want to do what we can). I am the youngest on my team by 12 years. I would guess that the average age of our team members is 45 (not including me in the calc). The great thing is, because I am willing to work and I lack the offensive attitude of the parent comment, I make BANK.

I fear for you, but I don't fear you.

Advising a High School Student by krasni_bor · 2003-05-21 06:56 · Score: 4, Interesting

I was sitting with an 11th grader yesterday looking through the catalogs of some nearby technical colleges. I think the kid would be a really good sys admin for some serious hardware, but the tech schools seem to be focusing on PC stuff. The only thing I could figure out was that you'd have to start with the generic training in school and then go to Sun or IBM for more specific sysadmin training (in addition to the learning on the job track).

What path would a kid take to get into real datacenter hardware?

Re:Advising a High School Student by m11533 · 2003-05-21 07:46 · Score: 1

I really have to laugh at placing Sun and IBM in the same catagory. No way. Sun, even its biggest systems, is still a workstation and server platform while IBM's mainframes are BIG iron. I do wonder where the IBM mainframe clones have gone? Amdahl anyone?
Re:Advising a High School Student by sql*kitten · 2003-05-21 08:39 · Score: 2, Funny

What path would a kid take to get into real datacenter hardware?

Go work for Unisys, IBM, CSC or EDS. Volunteer for the mainframes - there probably won't be much competition. Your colleagues will laugh at you, and tell you all about their "hot" Java skills. Quit after 5 years and become a contractor. Laugh at your former colleagues who're discovering that their skills are a cheap commodity now.
Re:Advising a High School Student by Squidgee · 2003-05-21 11:11 · Score: 1

Well, basically due to mainframes being phased out by beowulf-clusters, servers, etc, the clones couldn't make a ton of money. IBM was the only one who could continue with it.
Mainframes still have their place, midn you. Need tons of data to be moved or processed? Screw servers or PCs, get a mainframe.
There's still a place for mainframes, just a smaller one (Hence the clones couldn't survive). There will always be a place for them as well.
Re:Advising a High School Student by Inthewire · 2003-05-23 03:02 · Score: 1

Yep. I started working for EDS when I was 19.
I began as a material handler in an electronic parts warehouse.

Their organization of supplies sucked, so I took it upon myself to redo the layout and database (with permission).
This showed them I had initiative and creativity, and I got to ditch the parts-fetcher job and take of production scheduling.

I built Excel models to analyze demand and predict workflow.
They worked pretty damn well, too.

Then our contract (we were repairing laptops for an unnamed company) ran out, mostly due to the two years of screwups that had led to the facilities change that had led (indirectly) to my hiring.
So I had 60 (90?) days to find a job within the company.

I wound up on the tape floor of a massive datacenter in the Disaster Recovery Area group.
We handled the task of sending out backups and taking them back as the generations expired or we had a need for recovery.

Everyone on the floor was eligible for operator training.
I was in the first stage when we got a manager.
The old one left a day before I came on board, so this was my first direct boss.

She was a nightmare.
She had no concept of what we did or why we did it and she wasn't willing to learn.
Instead, she spent her time buddying up to her boss and filtering coffee for the toilet.

It was intolerable, so I, being young and foolish, acted like an asshole.
I got caught by a "every department needs to bring me at least two severed heads" decision, and I was on the street.
Fucking stupid, but that's where experience comes from.

So, long story short, my anecdotal experience supports your contention that EDS is a place where a relatively untrained individual can learn mainframes.
I used it as a place to learn what kissing up and fitting in is all about, which had greater application.
Maybe I'll put it to good use.

--

Writers imply. Readers infer.

This Article Sets Up Future H1B visa increase by Cryofan · 2003-05-21 07:02 · Score: 3, Insightful

This article is likely a setup article for other articles which will eventually oh-so-delicately suggest that more H1B programmers are needed from India because they supposedly still have the "old" technology, and we desperately need those old Indian skills, so therefore best that we increase the h1b programmer quota.

Some things never change......

--
eat shiat and bark at the moon

IN SOVIET RUSSIA by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 07:07 · Score: 0

Mainframe Admins You!

Don't forget H1Bs by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 07:08 · Score: 0

They can help in a big way here. H1Bs can pick up mainframe skills in no time and they don't demand a high salary.

I used to be a mainframe programmer by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 07:11 · Score: 0

but all the rumors back then that unix was going to kill off all those dinosaur mainframes convinced me to switch to unix. Now I'm an unemployed unix programmer.

Comment removed by account_deleted · 2003-05-21 07:13 · Score: 1

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Please Mod Parent UP! by theuglykid · 2003-05-21 07:15 · Score: 1

Well said!

I use COBOL and JCL every day! Though it's not as flashy as the new stuff, it's the backbone of our tax, customer, accounting, auditing, inventory, and letter systems.

Anyone who refuses to use such a potent language/tool in the face of it's obvious power and prevalence is truly a fool. Those who rail against it prove their ignorance.

Let them die out gracefully. by drgroove · 2003-05-21 07:16 · Score: 0

Mainframes were the locomotives of their day. Large, all-purpose, all-powerful machines. Computation centralized to one location.

And, just as the locomotive was eventually replaced by the automobile, so to have Mainframes been replaced by the PC and the Server - computing which is self-contained, user-driven, cheaper to own and operate, easier to repair and replace. In both cases, it is the will of the marketplace that makes this determination. If locomotives or mainframes were really integral to the world, they would still be important, pervasive, and in widespread use.

Let the Mainframes, and their admins, die off gracefully. Mainframes should be put out to pasture as admins become unavailable for them. Simple as that. The alternatives to mainframe operation are simply too attractive from a TCO standpoint for it to be any other way.

Re:Let them die out gracefully. by Jay+Maynard · 2003-05-21 07:27 · Score: 1

The alternatives to mainframe operation are simply too attractive from a TCO standpoint for it to be any other way.

Actually, this has been proven false several times. Google for "The Dinosaur Myth" for one well-known study...and no, it wasn't paid for by anyone invovled with selling mainframe stuff. The TCO of mainframes is as much lower than that of Unix systems as their cost is lower than that of Windows systems.

--
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Re:Let them die out gracefully. by jedidiah · 2003-05-21 07:40 · Score: 1

Locomotives were replaced by cars not because of any inherent in-efficiency but due to the fact that automotive infastructure is subsidized by the state. If you're primarily interested in well traveled routes, automobiles are remarkably inefficient. Most of the costs are just hidden and distributed across auto owners in general.

--
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Re:Let them die out gracefully. by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 07:49 · Score: 0

So tell me, when a company like AT&T has to process millions of invoices each month, how would PC's and servers be a better alternative?
Re:Let them die out gracefully. by pqdave · 2003-05-22 03:45 · Score: 1

For personal use and up to mid-sized delivery, the highway system is the best choice. For really large jobs, although it is possible to use the highway system, trains make more sense.

One of these tasks is transporting new automobiles...

*tap* *tap* by cyrax777 · 2003-05-21 07:17 · Score: 1

"REBOOT!"

easiest way to learn mainframe... by svallarian · 2003-05-21 07:18 · Score: 4, Informative

If you've got the free time, say 12-24 weeks or so...
Go buy an IBM Education card (around $3-$5k depending on which one you buy).
Head toward an IBM education center / Training center. (The one in Atlanta is very good).

And learn all you want for one low price. It's how I managed to learn AIX. Took me about 6 weeks to become very intimate with aix administration.

Steven V.
IBM CATE

--
I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."

Don't post drunk... by FatSean · 2003-05-21 07:20 · Score: 1

IBM is pushing Linux on the mainframe. Are you simple or something?

--
Blar.

Documentation by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 07:20 · Score: 0

foresight isn't a prerequisite for running a business.
Neither is paying for documentation...

where to get a mainframe ... by TheRealRamone · 2003-05-21 07:21 · Score: 1

Where on earth are you going to find an S/390?

How about Australia ?

Cobol? by Mithrilhall · 2003-05-21 07:23 · Score: 2, Funny

Sweet! Those Cobol classes I had to take over the last two semesters are finally going to pay off!

We got one by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 07:24 · Score: 0

We've got a mainframe admin, but he rarely makes it into work these days. He has a heck of a time finding someone to fix his Ford Model T when it breaks down.

we need to start hanging the politicians who are.. by Cryofan · 2003-05-21 07:25 · Score: 1

....selling us out to the Corporate lobbies who are trying to get more cheap desperate foreign labor.

Hang a few of them in Washington Mall and watch and see how the other get straight real quick.

Of course they should be hanged only after a fair trial in a court of law.

--
eat shiat and bark at the moon

Mainframes will be around for a long time by crackervoodoo · 2003-05-21 07:39 · Score: 1

Apparently they'll be around for a while, at least Hollywood thinks so. The agents in the Matrix series are constantly trying to get the "codes" for Zion's mainframe! I really have nothing important to add to this discussion. I spent about 6 years of my life working on Vax VMS mainframes and want to just put that behind me...

Bullshit yourself by smitty45 · 2003-05-21 07:44 · Score: 1

you saying you're a 390 or MVS programmer ? yeah right. Unix != mainframes, bonehead.

You just hit on the problem. by mindstrm · 2003-05-21 07:44 · Score: 3, Interesting

Look how many geeks out there are *INTERESTED* in the idea, and would like to learn about it...

But as you said, we "obviously have no idea how it works" because it's hard to find out! The mainframe world is a separate place, secret, etc.

So how do we change that?

And is mainframe admin worth it financially?

Re:You just hit on the problem. by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 08:19 · Score: 0

It's not some separate, secret place. The reason (my opinion, obviously) is that most kids coming out of college today see the salary levels of Unix/WinNT admins and think that mainframe salaries should be the same. My belief is that mainframe salaries are more in line with the reset of the world's salaries. You start out relatively low, pay your dues, then your salary goes up over time.
Thanks to the dot com whoopdeedoo (that, and Hollywood foisting the whole bigger-faster-sooner-than-now attitude on us all), no one wants to start low anymore.
Re:You just hit on the problem. by Amiga+Trombone · 2003-05-21 09:34 · Score: 2, Interesting

And is mainframe admin worth it financially?

I'd be interested in knowing that myself. I'm an ex MVS sys prog that jumped to Unix administration about 10 years ago because it was a lot more lucrative.

Dependending on what the money is these days, it may be a good time to jump back.

In 1992, mainframers were a dime a dozen, Unix admins were as rare as hen's teeth. Looks like that situation is quickly being reversed.
Re:You just hit on the problem. by flink · 2003-05-22 04:47 · Score: 1

When you graduate with $30k+ worth of college debt, then yeah, you don't want to start low. I know that personally I wouldn't have taken a job for less than $60k when I got out of school.

Mainframe emulators running under Linux by shocking · 2003-05-21 07:47 · Score: 4, Informative

You can get a mainframe emualtor (IBM 370 series here http://www.conmicro.cx/hercules/ They also have links to versions of various IBM OS's that you can download. Enjoy!

Okay by mindstrm · 2003-05-21 07:49 · Score: 2, Interesting

Let's hear some specifics, if anyone has them, about WHY those mainframes are in use, and what advantages they have. Real numbers, if possible.

WE wll know they are bigger, mroe robust, fault tolerant, etc, and run weird operating systems, and people only use weird languages on them like rexx and cobol and fortran.

What is the gain? Why are these languages used? What is the real deal with mainframes, and why would anyone other than a legacy operation want one nowadays?

Re:Okay by easter1916 · 2003-05-21 08:07 · Score: 2, Informative

What do you define as a legacy operation? "Legacy" is a term of abuse coined by those who want to make their technology seem better just by virtue of being newer. There are plenty of modern languages being used on midrange and mainframe systems -- Java, C++ and others.
WE wll [sic] know they are bigger, mroe robust, fault tolerant, etc
I think you just answered your own question.
Re:Okay by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 08:27 · Score: 0

I work at a credit union running a specialized system known as Symitar (www.symitar.com). It runs on top of an IBM RS/6000 running AIX. While not "technically" a mainframe, it's pretty much the same thing. Nothing is actually done in AIX, but entirely through this Symitar frontend. It batch processes, uses job files, and has it's own programming language. If you're any sort of medium to large financial institution, you use some sort of hulkin' mainframe with a specialized (a.k.a. proprietary) interface because there's no practical alternative.
Re:Okay by Moose4 · 2003-05-21 08:35 · Score: 2, Informative

Nothing moves data like a mainframe and nothing stays up like a mainframe. They are the most reliable platforms out there. IBM used the phrase "five nines" to describe it--99.999% uptime.

Now they're going to companies that already have a big mainframe investment in physical plant and people and saying, "Look, buy this new bigger box and move all your legacy COBOL apps over onto it. You'll still have enough room left over to run DB2 on it and use it as a database server, AND, set up several hundred instances of Linux and run Apache to run your website." The company gets to keep its old platform until such time as they want to move off it, they get a godawful fast database server, and they get a "Webserver farm" inside one box with far superior reliability to racks and racks of off-the-shelf PCs.

IBM jumping on the Linux bandwagon is really out of character, but it's a smart move.

--
"Settle down, Beavis. We've got an experiment to do."
Re:Okay by kiwirob · 2003-05-21 16:47 · Score: 1

"Legacy" is an unducumented Banking system called CIF that I used to work on in New Zealand. The main module CF03 comprised of over 300,000 lines of statically linked assembler code.

It was written in 60's or 70's originally and as it was going to be replaced in the 80's/early 90's by a new system called IBIS all documentation was stopped to keep the cost down. When IBIS flopped and the banks where still running the old Assembler code in the very late 90's they had a wee small Y2K issue to deal with.

THIS IS LEGACY CODE
Re:Okay by cathouse · 2003-05-22 04:29 · Score: 1

THAT'S where I got the phrase! I've been using 'five nines' for thiry-five years to describe the level of certainty that not-even-God-gets, and had entirely forgotten where it came from!

--
Thelma, I'm not making ANY deals.

Re:Legacy-Unreality. by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 07:50 · Score: 0

"System recovery time is simply a function of the commitment level of management."

Another one of your non-answers you're famous for[1]. Throw enough money and time at any problem an you can make a brick fly. Problem is that's not the real world. The one your answer ignores.

[1] Google his name in Usenet.

Locomotives are still around by Ra5pu7in · 2003-05-21 07:50 · Score: 5, Insightful

Locomotives / freight trains are still used regularly. They serve a need that cannot be met with automobiles or even 18-wheelers. For Joe Sixpack and his family, an automobile is definitely a more efficient way to cross the country. For ABC Florist who relies on fresh cuttings, locomotives take too long - trucks are better. But for XYZ Furniture ordering fifty sofas, twenty-five coffee tables, one thousand various lamps, etc., it would take a large number of trucks (each having a driver to pay) vs. twelve cars in a freight train (one driver to pay).

There is a use for mainframes in particular industries - personal computers and servers aren't the be-all end-all answer to every computing need.

--
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)

Re:Locomotives are still around by easter1916 · 2003-05-21 08:10 · Score: 1

If I had mod points you'd get them. It's so tiresome dealing with these know-nothing children who think the PC platform is the solution to ALL computing needs. When all you have (or in this case, understand) is a hammer, I suppose all problems look like nails.
Re:Locomotives are still around by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 15:28 · Score: 0

Locomotives are easy to replace. You can buy a brand new locomotive with all the features you need. With a mainframe you can't just unplug one model and plug in a new one. The system I work on (as an application developer) was installed in 1969. Just about everything is coded in Fortran V (Field Data, not ASCII). The max program size is 63K. So take a suite of applications written in a dead language without an off the shelf equivalent, an (now non-standard) alphabet of 6 bits to the byte, and a whole mess of flat files with the basic unit of a 'word' (36 bits), 2,000 program executions per second (though that is a 'cheating' number since with only 63K for a program size we have to do a bit of processing and then hand off to the next program for more processing and so on which inflates the number of programs), and replace it with a server and a bunch of PCs???
Re:Locomotives are still around by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 15:48 · Score: 0

Every day, I time my commute around a train that carries nothing but Corn Oil. Once I counted 83 cars. This is of course just a fraction of the daily demand for fried food in the Los Angeles area. We eat vegetable oil by the hundreds of tons a day.

curse them all by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 07:52 · Score: 0

Maybe if these companies would make their experience requirements a little more realistic,
You can't even get an entry level job anymore, I'm trained in COBOL, but their are next to
no entry level COBOL jobs because they expect you to have thirty plus years of
experience, isn't the whole problem that the present workforce is entering retirement age?
start training people, start hiring kids with no experience crap.

-troy

p.s., I know COBOL is supposed to be the antithesis of everything geek but it's kinda fun to write in a language where "move doodie to toilet." is actually code.

Words from a COBOL coder by grumwork · 2003-05-21 07:56 · Score: 4, Interesting

I find it funny that all you Java/C++ coders are upset about not being able to learn COBOL to land mainframe jobs.

I just finished taking a Java course so I could have a way out of my COBOL-dreary job.

The grass is always greener...

Re:Words from a COBOL coder by Cnik70 · 2003-05-21 09:56 · Score: 1

hehe.... I did the same thing a few years ago. I got tired of doing COBOL and RPG coding on the AS/400, so I simply put my brain to use and added Java to my skillset. I never did understand those who always felt that they had to stick to one language, one platform or one IT role. The field is far to vast to corner ones self into a narrow set of skills. The real key though, is making sure that you stay current on all skills rather than let one ones fade from memory.

--
-Cnik
Re:Words from a COBOL coder by kiwirob · 2003-05-21 16:41 · Score: 1

I've changed my skillset heaps
From a s370 Assembler Programmer
to CICS Cobol
to IBM Direct Talk 2 (with a bit of CC2 for fun)
to HTML, Javascript, Miva Script
To PHP, Python

I couldn't believe it when I got my first PC at work. I'd had about 4-5 years of poxy green screen text terminals before I was important enough to get my own PC.

Just a view of an old programmer.. by tuomoks · 2003-05-21 08:09 · Score: 1

Started -71 on IBM mainframes, BAL, Cobol, PL/I - currently writing configuration engine using Python & Prolog to configure both Java (J2ME) application on Palm and C/C#/Delphi applications in Windows for wireless systems BUT the only thing changed from 70's is the languages and comm. protocols, objects, methods, etc.. still the same. OK - another differences, (IBM) documentation was better long time ago, training was 6-8 weeks/year ( on system programmer level ) and IMHO the development environments were better (not the GUIs) We used source/object management ( even at the time of puch cards ) with all the benefits of common code and routines, etc. Haven't seen that a long time. Anyway - to manage a mainfram is not much different - only, the companies that use those take application/environment changes very seriously - the systems I used to play/support were all running 24x7 so resource / environment / application / OS planning and testing had always very high priority AND all changes had to go through operations (i.e. system programming fun/pain at the same time). Nice thing today is that I don't have to write on CC level any more and no more home grown SVCs ! So - maybe we old programmers can learn new (old) tricks but how to teach those to the younger generation ?

Raise Wages for US workers instead. by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 08:11 · Score: 0

Raise wages; eliminate labor shortage. Easy.

MOD Parent UP !!! by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 08:15 · Score: 0

Guy nailed it. The immigration lawyers who
want desperately to exploit guest workers want
to continue the H1-B program. With millions
of un-employed American workers; this is a
good way to scrounge up docile, rightless workers
from another continent.

Comment removed by account_deleted · 2003-05-21 08:17 · Score: 1

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Hmm... by GreyOrange · 2003-05-21 08:33 · Score: 1

I'm an young man who got obsessed with using mainframe emulators because I admire the retro style where things usualy work(not always ofcourse), were small, and fast, any advice on getting a (high) paying job on actual machines, it would be realy nice to work with the real behemoths.

Thanks

--

Insert Witty Remark Here ===>____________________________

From the Devil's IT Dictionary by Frankus · 2003-05-21 08:36 · Score: 3, Insightful

mainframe n. An obsolete device still used by thousands of obsolete companies serving billions of obsolete customers and making huge obsolete profits for their obsolete shareholders. And this year's run twice as fast as last year's.

No question by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 08:36 · Score: 0

Would you rather pull a heavy wagon with a large horse or a hundred chickens?

No question, a hundred chickens. Think how funny that shit would be!!

It's more than just immigration lawyers... by Cryofan · 2003-05-21 08:38 · Score: 1

....Business lobbies are the main entities feeding the bribes, err, campaign contributions, and the think tanks and Public Relations (PR) firms that collaborate to get similar "news stories" published in many media outlets. But there are many entities that want more immigration, both educated H1B's and uneducation latin american peasants. The lobbies that represent restaurants and hotels are also very influential.

--
eat shiat and bark at the moon

Re:It's more than just immigration lawyers... by MyTwoCents · 2003-05-22 01:55 · Score: 1

Another facet is that the older mainframe programmers tend to be purged based on age when major companies layoff. Here in New York, most of the unemployed mainframe guys I know do not think there is a shortage.

I'm a 23 mainframe programmer wth 2yrs experiance by AForwardMotion · 2003-05-21 08:38 · Score: 0

But I'm about to leave the mainframe business and go after something that will pay me better. Of course nobody wants to go into mainframes! It is boring repetitive work and the pay is terrible.

instead of denigrating mainframes and COBOL by TheLoneGundam · 2003-05-21 08:52 · Score: 2, Interesting

A few smart guys will realize that anywhere there's a shortage there's money to be made. I am a mainframe 'techie' (systems programmer) and when I retire from the public payroll I should be able to do consulting for ten years or so at somewhat lucrative rates. As for .NET and some of the other 'remote computing' objectives - that's reinventing the old tube-and-mainframe model, just with prettier UIs. And on the third hand (hey, if we can count from 0 to 15 we can have three hands), the current levels of z/OS are Unix-branded, with all POSIX APIs, run HTTP servers, and do pretty much everything any other server can do (including SMB support so we can pretend to be Windows file and print servers just like Linux). I can stand to get more acquainted with "your" technologies like HTTP and Java to put them to use on my z/OS box. And I'm willing to SHARE the knowledge necessary for those of you that want to upgrade the skills necessary to take advantage of the looming skills shortage

Comment removed by account_deleted · 2003-05-21 09:02 · Score: 1

Comment removed based on user account deletion

You're wrong, d00d by sql*kitten · 2003-05-21 09:17 · Score: 2, Funny

Were you to try to do ANYTHING with a mainframe (I'm thinking s/390 or z/OS here) armed with the knowledge you mentioned you would be so horribly lost it wouldn't even be funny.

Actually, it would be funny ;-)

Of course... by sryx · 2003-05-21 09:26 · Score: 1

The procreation rate of any techie is bad enough let alone the Mainframe techie!? Women it's time to do your part!
-Jason
P.S. If this is some way for dipfan to get a girlfriend then good luck man! never give up, never surender!

Hehe by aepervius · 2003-05-21 09:45 · Score: 1

Actually we *are* using a compiled on our mainframe without ansi support (an version older than Fortran 77) and we do not have VI. The system is *far* from being dead, (it is actually used by a lot of airline). It is real time and robust. Does it make it more dead because there is no vi ? Frankly I would laugh , except that sometimes I wish there was a vi instead of a command line editor...

--
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org

60,000 too high? by lysium · 2003-05-21 09:53 · Score: 1

If desktop technicians command $45-55K, why shouldn't junior admins make 5-10K more? Granted, these are New York City prices -- but $50,000 is rediculously low for a skilled, experienced professional! Seriously.

Are you telling me that a year's worth of work from your two hands and one mind is only worth that much? Sounds like poor self-esteem to me. You are worth what you think you are, I guess.

--
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.

Re:60,000 too high? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 10:09 · Score: 0

You are worth what you think you are,

You are worth what you can get. But nobody is ever going to give you *more* than you ask for. Therefore, trying to be "reasonable" before negotiations even begin is a sucker's game.
Re:60,000 too high? by Eskarel · 2003-05-21 12:11 · Score: 1

Well there are some major problems here. First of all, in any field other than engineering and up till just recently tech work, 50,000 is a high salary, it's significantly higher than the national average, this is especially the case if you're one of the older workers who doesn't have a degree.
Secondly, we're not talking about New York City or California, we're talking about everywhere else. Cost of living in most of those places is probably going to go down too since there are very few people who can afford that and companies aren't going to keep paying those kind of salaries anymore.
Thirdly, as the kind of junior admin I was referring to(which is to say as someone who isn't really needed and who will screw up), you are not either skilled or experienced, you are a trainee. No this isn't perfect people who are already married with children, but that's not really the point, the point is to get younger people trained on this stuff.
Re:60,000 too high? by lysium · 2003-05-22 00:15 · Score: 2, Insightful

I beg to differ. The defacto trainiee is the Help Desk technician and the desktop technician. People who are beginning to know the fundamentals of computer/information systems. Many organizations will not even let IT/MIS staff log onto a server until they have demonstrated responsibile, intelligent actions. No one is going to allow trainees to operate production servers.
Now the junior admin is still necessary, but the "junior" is something of a misnomer; The job is hardly entry-level now. Another factor: the job pool is still overflowing with the gold-digging inept. So many untechnical (at heart) people are masquarading as IT workers, that it becomes necessary to offer more money simply to attract a level of competence.
Or these are just clever rationalizations. Funny, you speak of paltry living wages as a positive thing. You see, the corporate people on top of the pyramid will still be making "New York wages" while the techies join the rest of the wage slaves making "Missouri wages." So yes, the companies cannot afford to employ everyone at exaggerated salary levels: in the future, the executives will simply make certain to keep it only for themselves. This suspicion will always make me advocate higher wages for skilled labor.

--
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
Re:60,000 too high? by Eskarel · 2003-05-22 03:47 · Score: 1

That's the point though. In my original post I said that the IT industry needs to have a system whereby people can get experience with the administration technology without having the real ability to screw it up in any major way. I know that junior admins now aren't in that position, but that isn't really the point, there should be an entry level apprentice program for admins because they we wouldn't have so many bloody awful admins(well after a while at least, a lot of admins would be trained by bloody awful admins, but still).
As for joining the rest of the wage slaves, welcome to the real world, IT isn't a magical golden money basket, idiot managers threw billions of dollars into it thinking it would be, but it wasn't. IT is necessary for survival, but they aren't going to throw money at it anymore.
I sincerely believe that the tech field is never going to be what it was for employees. In the early years we got paid high wages because there was more demand than their was supply, simple economics very few people knew anything about computers. In the mid 90's, there started being a lot more of us, but people thought that IT would miraculously make them rich, so the demand increased accordingly. Now, demand has seriously decreased, we, like nearly everyone else, are now a tool which will be used where the company deems it will be effective, but that's about it, and there are now more CS people drawn by the lure of money, than there are jobs. That is to say, you are a wage slave now whether you like it or not and the only way to solve that is to do something about the basic structure of the world.
Now maybe, in 10 or 20 years, when no one takes CS because they think it's a golden money opportunity(though for nearly everyone else, 40k right out of college is still damned good), the supply will decrease and we'll get good wages again, but only temporarily.
As for the Missouri wages issue, I was saying that, especially in Silicon Valley(plenty of people survive in New York on a lot less than you get), cost of living will decrease because there aren't a whole bunch of financially irresponsible millionares running around anymore. You can't charge more than people can afford to pay.
I wish that I could still have walked out of college into a $80,000 a year job without even having to look simply because of who I am, but I've been looking at the job market, and it's not that great, there are jobs, but at least in the US they all want you to know every single new technology and have 3 years of experience in it. I've even seen jobs which want more years of experience with .NET, than .NET has existed. Yes you can get around degree(though I wish you couldn't since I have one) and experience requirements, but the only way I can compete with the people who actually have that experience is that I don't think the $40,000 a year they offer me is a pittance.

I'm a fugitive from the law of averages? by alumshubby · 2003-05-21 09:59 · Score: 2, Insightful

I'm an early-40s guy who's retraining to be a programmer (been a tech writer), and I'd like to break into COBOL programming -- mainly because around here at least, it looks like the road less traveled.

--
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->

22.... by Elpacoloco · 2003-05-21 10:36 · Score: 1

Mind you please that this is one fifth of my entire lifetime. If I "ain't done shit" then I'm in very deep trouble.

Re:22.... by aflat362 · 2003-05-21 15:33 · Score: 1

You must be pretty damn confident with yourself to think you'll see 110 yrs!

--
Conserve Oil, Recycle, Boycott Walmart
Re:22.... by Elpacoloco · 2003-05-21 15:45 · Score: 1

Well, grandpa lived to be 89, and I'm anticipating that medicine will distinctly improve in the next 60 years.

Bah Mainframes R Easy To Administer by badman99 · 2003-05-21 10:47 · Score: 0

Everyone knows Mainframes have lots of flashing lights and you just have to ask them to disarm the missiles aimed at Russia. Havn't any of you guys seen 'War Games' sheesh.

Yikes! Re:Let them die out gracefully. by TheZork · 2003-05-21 10:47 · Score: 1

PCs (client/server computing) are very good at certain things, yes. Large groups of them acting in concert are getting pretty good at doing what mainframes do. Still, for a bunch of tasks, mainframes kick all kinds of ass. They are yet "integral to the world" - if you get a utility bill, or have insurance, or fly commercially, or buy Post-Its.

I want to live in a world where the best tools win and people get trained to run them. The notion that we should choose our technologies based on the available talent pool bugs the hell out of me.

If you don't think the current users of mainframes are concerned about TCO (real TCO, like budgets-bigger-than-God's TCO), you've never spent time with their CFOs or CIOs. The iron is still at the center of the shop for a reason.

Okay. by mindstrm · 2003-05-21 11:22 · Score: 1

I'll clarify.

Everyoen talks briefly about these attributes mainframes have. I want to know more spefics... why exactly does the use of older languages on these machines, and what is it about the design of hte machiens, that makes them still attractive.

By "legacy" i mean those institutions that have upgraded incrementally over the years and continue to use mainframes mainly because they have always used them, in other words, if a new system were to be designed, it may actually be done without mainframes, but they stick to them anyway.

I'm looking for DETAILS... not one-word reasons why they are used.

But no one wants to learn mainframes... by zazylawy · 2003-05-21 11:24 · Score: 2, Interesting

I work at a large 3-letter acronym company where we develop for AIX, AS/400 and S/390. I'm one of the youngest there (and working exclusively on 390) and I can tell you right now that no matter what other posts here say, *almost no one* under the age of 40 seems to want to have ***anything*** to do with 390.

I don't see this trend changing, no matter how many people post on /. and say they'd love to get the chance play with a 390 to their heart's content. There are tons of bright, curious geeks where I work, but after a short time on 390, they tend to turn 180 degrees and run like mad!

People avoid it like the plague, and I honestly think some of them go out of their way to avoid learning *anything* about the VM and MVS side of things so that they're not dubbed "a 390 person".

390 has definitely grown on me and I'm looking forward to growing old and becoming a white haired "390 guru" ;-), but I certainly have a hard time seeing it becoming a sought after position simply because so much of it is archaic, difficult to learn and most importantly, not "glamorous".

Re:Legacy-Broken digits. by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 12:48 · Score: 0

"Here's the scenario: A hdd fails, the system automatically calls IBM and a tech is dispatched the same day. I get paged, and meet a tech at the front door.
"

What do you do when the dialer breaks?

Old Bastard Sysadmins by thogard · 2003-05-21 13:15 · Score: 2, Funny

Years ago I worked for a group that ran a bunch of systems that didn't fit in with anything else in the MIS department. One of the systems was a very old IBM 3081. This thing had water cooling and boxes and boxes of storage devices. It was a serious bit of big iron.

Sometime in 1993 we had meetings where the clueless manager would ask us the uptime so should could put it on her report. Our group would report the different servers we ran with a 50 to 100 day uptime but the old guy who ran the 3081 would claim 4767 days or 13 years or 17 billion microseconds depending on the week.

At some point we were told everyone was going through "team training" and we were the second group scheduled. We made the people running the team training cry and the had to postpone it for a few days while they could collect their thoughts (and feelings?) A second revolt was led by the Old Bastard Sysadmin at teh mention of a group hug.

At the time I had been doign sysadmin work for 8 years but the Old Bastard Sysadmin taught me some of the finer points of being a BOFH.

no mainframe techies shortage by ceCA · 2003-05-21 13:36 · Score: 1

I am an unemployed mainframe programmer. There is no reason to retrain a 20 or 30 somethings. Plenty of 40 and 50 year olds would do the work who are unemployed. This is all freakn BS. There is a shortage of underpaid mainframe programmers!! Most likely the work has been shipped to India.

or rather... by rebelcool · 2003-05-21 14:05 · Score: 1

millions of simple transactions every second. No PC farm on the planet can handle that kind of I/O.

--

-

Someone got that wrong! by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 14:08 · Score: 0

Mainframes are a dying breed!

It's only RIGHT that the appropriate 'techies' die with them.
and personally I HOPE it's a slow and torturous death! MUHAHAHA!

Thank god, at least some of the olds are finally seeing the light!

Career Upgrade by nurb432 · 2003-05-21 14:10 · Score: 1

Hey, just because you are employed currently doesn't mean you turn down a better offer...

--
---- Booth was a patriot ----

Both 390 and Linux skills are needed by richman555 · 2003-05-21 14:59 · Score: 2, Interesting

After working with Linux on OS/390 (SLES 7)on my company's ZSeries mainframe is that you end up with 3 kinds of admins. Those who know the 390 side, those who know the Linux side, and some that know both. Knowing both operating systems is probably the toughest, however ultimately you can have Linux techs administering on mainframe hardware. Youll see fewer drive failures on the mainframe thats for sure and stop server sprawl. My company has a ton of vital legacy programs written on the 390 side of the fence while the Linux side is running large samba file shares, some apache webservers, and a few DB2 databases. All this said, this fall we are going live with a large scale ecommerce site using Websphere Commerce Suite 5.4 all under Linux on the mainframe (about 20,000 products online and many more skus). This is all replacing an always growing amount of server hardware that was NT4 based MS Siteserver Commerce Edition machines. This technology does have its merits!

I don't see much demand by walterbyrd · 2003-05-21 15:25 · Score: 1

Go to the job sites, and type in "COBOL" or MVS or whatever. There are practically no jobs.

I don't see any shortage of people to do the jobs.

Re:I don't see much demand by TW+Burger · 2003-05-22 05:58 · Score: 1

I agree, there is no shortage of Mainframe operators/programmers. My lack of employment and any quick Web search is proof.

Comment removed by account_deleted · 2003-05-21 15:26 · Score: 1

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Seems to be a cyclical problem in most industries. by HaggiZ · 2003-05-21 16:13 · Score: 1

It's highly unlikely these institutions will move away from their mainframes any time soon. They work, they are stable, why would they? To implement a new system means a massive change to process everywhere, with no guarantee that maintenance will be any cheaper in the long term or that the new system could be as stable.

And at the end of the day, it will always come down to a business case assessing the cost benefit of each alternative.

In this scenario, expect the wage of these staff to sky rocket. They'll be able to name their own figure and working conditions. The youngins will see this, marvel at it, and work frantically to get there so they can chase the dollars too. The problem is, by the time they are up to speed thousands of others have done the exact same thing and now there is a shortage of work.

It happens in most industries. People dont like being labourers, suddenly there is a shortage so their earnings go up and the job becomes more attractive. The same thing happens within IT, only more regularly.

There are lots of you out there at the moment looking for work, because there is currently too many people and not enough jobs. How many in the current marketplace got into the IT industry just because they thought it was the place to be and didn't actually have a love for it? They'll die off because they can't find work and have to chase the next big thing. In the meantime, those that are in it for the love become recognised as the highly skilled and reliable workers they are and keep things moving.

At the end of the day, I think if you keep with your passion you ultimately end up riding the wave infront of all those people that jump on purely because something is popular. Follow your heart and the rest just falls into place with any luck.

Kudos to those tireless cobol guys that ensure my money travels through the various institutions every day. Shame on you those that are now going to try and profit from this and lower the high standard of work these people have set.

--
Glenn
The Smrt way to trade CFDs on the ASX

It's not the same mindset at all. by Pig+Hogger · 2003-05-21 16:26 · Score: 2, Informative

25 years ago, I started diddling on bitty-boxen (PET, APPLE, Exidy Sorcerer, Cromemco). During that time, often you had no OS to speak of, and much less applications.

You had to write your own apps, and to do so, you had to know the hardware inside out and how to drive the devices directly.

20 years ago, after bitty-boxing for a big company, I was told that I had 3 months to learn how to program the big IBM mainframe.

So, the first thing I did was to show up in the girl-who-was-in-charge-of-the-big-iron's office and ask her for the hardware reference manuals. I might as well asked her to strip naked and go dance on the boardroom table. Why do you want to know that??? she asked me, blinking in disbelief. It took me three weeks to learn that it was a 16 bit machine.

Those people have no imagination; they have been carefully promoted from the ranks of the typing pool so that they don't represent any kind of threat to upper-management, so it's no wonder that they didn't find any problem with punch cards. Why would one want to have an interactive session with a computer is totally beyond them, and I'm not surprised that they'd think the idea quite subversive.

Heck, 3 years before, when I came to work for that company (in R&D), the coders were working on PAPER forms, which were sent to TYPISTS who PUNCHED CARDS (that was 1980, people!!!) so the program changes could be fed the dinosaur. There was only one guy with a terminal on his desk - we (in the R&D) figured that he must have been an important analyst - he had a TERMINAL!!!

Nope. The guy was the FILE MANAGER. Yup! The guy's job was to manage the files on the computer; in 1980 they still used DOS, which let your programs write directly to the sectors on the disks; he was MANUALLY allocating disk spaces for the files!!! But I disgress. (Fortunately, by the time I was asked to move on the mainframe, they had upgraded to VM and the lowly programmers had their own terminals (imagine the revolution!).

As I said, it was hard to learn anything valuable from those drones; however, what little information I was able to scrap together left me absolutely flabberghasted at the power and the cleverness of the hardware organization of the machine.

Then I also went on to diddle around with CMS, which I found absolutely rocking as a shell. And after three months of being paid diddling around with the big iron, I came one morning to work to find that my HP terminal (through which I accessed the IBM through a gateway) had been replaced by one of those real slick and huge IBM terminals with the huge 18 inch screen and the green phosphor and the clickety-click keyboard (with a solenoid clicker for good measure -and- to let you know that the keyboard repeated).

I was not working on the mainframe, maintaining garbage COBOL programs written 20 years before, or worse, changing ASSEMBLER programs. At least, there were a bit of PL/1 programs to change. It's a good thing that I was in the first of several huge layoffs batches that started to happen soon, because I would have quit anyways...

That experience left me with a bitter sense of total waste of ressources; fantastic hardware given to totally moronic people who should never have had anything more complex than a pencil in their hands.

S370 Assembler by kiwirob · 2003-05-21 16:36 · Score: 2, Informative

This story reminded me of my old days as a S370 Assembler programmer at Databank in New Zealand. We had a nightly update banking system in assembler that would process all the deposits, withdrawls, interest, fees etc in 12 minutes from start to finish and contained over 300,000 lines of assembler. One module CF03AG had been hacked so much for so many years that it had run out of base registers for accessability,a dn we had to hack addressability somehow. The system was at one time use by the 4 main trading banks here in New Zealand, ANZ, BNZ, National Bank and Westpac. National Bank decided to leave and used computer system from Systematics in Little Rock. This NEW system was mainly COBOL. From 12 minutes from start to finish their new system took 4-6 hours to do the same job. It was great to learn progamming with Assembler on the mainframe. Today I can pick up any system in any language and can start working in it with pretty much no problems. I did use to have the odd "SOC7" nightmare when I mixed my packed decimals with my ... shit can't remember any more. BXLE I think was my fav instruction

You think that's sad... by sbszine · 2003-05-21 17:53 · Score: 1

$ ping hostname
sh: ping: not found

The one that makes me tear my hair out:

ut-uac1$ man perl No manual entry for perl.

--

Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling

cobol by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 18:24 · Score: 0

I learned cobol. You'd be hard pressed to pay me enough to actually program in it though. *shudders*

Tandem legacy by Animats · 2003-05-21 19:07 · Score: 1

Tandem really had redundancy right with their "NonStop" systems. These were the first real clustered machines, back in the 1970s and 1980s. Those systems still run most of the world's mission-critical systems. See this summary from a Stanford class.

Tandem hardware is fault-intolerant by design. It's the system that's fault-tolerant. There's heavy checking, and if anything fails, that machine goes down, right then. Each active process has a mirror on another machine, synchronized with messages. If the primary fails, the backup takes over. The backup (now primary) then creates a new backup on a new machine.

One of the more interesting features of this architecture is that you can add and delete hardware without a shutdown. It's even possible (and routine) to migrate to completely different hardware in a different physical location without a shutdown.

I did the other kind.... by hughk · 2003-05-21 19:29 · Score: 1

You really don't want to do the other RPG, especially the earlier releases (RPGII/III).

--
See my journal, I write things there

More reasons why it's hard to find mainframe techs by krinsh · 2003-05-21 19:54 · Score: 1

"Responsible for maintaining systems... and knowledge transfer". Most of these guys are into management now and don't want or need to get paid, even six plus figures, to maintain these machines. And why would I want to provide "knowledge transfer"? For one; how many computer engineers do you know are eager to teach - and why, if I had these skills, would I want to give my employer an opportunity to get rid of me and keep the person I just taught - especially when they'll get paid far far less than me, a double insult?

--
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.

The place for Java and .net... by hughk · 2003-05-21 19:59 · Score: 1

is at the front-end, because seriously, it spends most of its time waiting for the user and people don't worry so much when their PC crashes.

At the back end you want fast and reliable code that easily model your business processes.

The world's largest electronic excahnge for the trading of derivatives Eurex runs on a cluster of four Alphas running VMS. The backend is written partly in C but mostly in COBOL. The language is very good for file I/O with ISAM support embedded in the language. New stuff continues to be written in it because it really makes programming easier (a lot more transparent) and it is extremely fast.

Regrettably, the thing that ruins it is that we couldn't use MOVE CORRESPONDING because Accidenture were responsible for much of the original stuff and they had sucky coding conventions.

--
See my journal, I write things there

Now you know IBM have changed by ites · 2003-05-21 20:32 · Score: 1

From the company they used to be in the 1980s. They have a sense of humour. Not only do they still make "dinosaur" machines, they make them big and mean and frankly, after Jurassic Park, it's not a bad branding move. T-Rex is, after all, the meanest of them all.

This discussion has been interesting, since I spent many years working on mainframes: MVS, TSO, VM/CMS, et al. But to really feel the mainframe "experience", you had to work on a Siemens BS2000, built by Fujitsu, running a poor imitation of TSO/CICS/DB2.

We wrote a *lot* of Cobol code, not applications, but tools: editors, code generators, reporting tools, virtual i/o layers, the works. When we got our software to run on a PC (MS-DOS 3.2 with Realia Cobol), I knew the mainframe was dead.

IBM tried hard to reproduce the mainframe experience on their AS/400 machines, but it was never really the same again. Our team got used to response times measured in seconds rather than minutes. We started to hack Rexx and JCL to get interactive compiles, rather than the normal batch queues. We began mucking with the holy 3270 terminals and get them to show colours.

However, there is wisdom in the mainframe model, often forgotten under the layers of crud that we were forced to wade through. Simple transaction processing systems can be incredibly efficient. Forget J2EE and .NET - these are the bastard children of a stoned generation. Look at a transaction processing system like CICS and you will see a model that is brutally efficient.

And which can be quite easily implemented on any modern PC. Been there, done that, and it works real nice.

--
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.

Average /.er response... by MrPCsGhost · 2003-05-21 22:32 · Score: 1

I'm a mainframe administrator, in his low 30s, and whenever there is a story about mainframe employment, it generally degenerates into the following:

1) COBOL?!? It's so boring!
2) They don't pay newbies enough! (see #3)
3) They expect me to have experience! (see #2)
4) They should move it to a Beowulf cluster!

Regarding (1), administering a mainframe has very little COBOL, if any at all. That's for programmers. If any of my co-administrators deals with COBOL, it's because she (yes, she in this case) is the one who handles everything to do with configuring the COBOL compilers and related products.

(2 & 3) Why do you think the oldsters are rolling in the bucks? My employer (govt) is not hiring anyone, let alone mainframers. They're firing. But, the oldsters' 401k's have tanked, so they are not going anywhere for a while. Also, when the majority of the youngsters have such a shitty attitude and an unwillingness to learn "legacy", why would we want to hire them? We have tons of Java programmers creating applications for WebSphere running on the mainframe, and they treat the mainframe like a joke. Yeah, I'm gonna want to train one of those bozos. They don't have a clue.

(4) Yeah, right.

Mainframe dying? Doubt it. Sure, you can point to some big server farms out there as "successful" (I don't know... Amazon?). But, who's using mainframes? Big banks. Govt. Big industry. The people who have been using mainframes for decades, and have been making a ton of money for decades. You want them to change how they do business? You're going to walk up to Andrew Carnegie or JP Morgan and say, "You should lose those mainframes!" He'll light his cigar with a thousand dollar bill and say, "Beat it, kid."

Like Mr. Sutton said, "It's where the money is."

A clue by sql*kitten · 2003-05-21 23:02 · Score: 0, Troll

The word "legacy" keeps popping up in correlation with mainframes, and this is really why most of them are still around - legacy code that no one wants to re-do for other systems

You seem to be labouring under the idea that a mainframe is necessarily old. Let me clue you in: they're still being actively developed, and an IBM zSeries will handily spank the top-of-the-line Unix boxes from Sun without breaking a sweat.

The reasons for keeping the legacy systems are obvious: cost of conversion, proven correctness, etc. However, I still think the scalability and reliability (e.g.: redundancy, resource pooling, load balancing, etc.) of NoW (Networks of Workstations)

None of those things you mention can be done with a "network of workstations" in any comparable way to what can be done with a mainframe. Next you'll be saying a "beowulf cluster" can replace a mainframe. Nothing in the Unix world comes even close to IBM's Sysplex. Mainframes have 99.999% uptimes as standard. Mainframes can deliver quality-of-service (QoS) - you know in advance exactly how long your job will take to complete, because you know that the system can guarantee a minimum level of resource, no matter what else it is doing. You can hot swap drives, processors, nodes, anything you want.

will in time push both the mainframe and nearly anachronistic programming language Cobol out the door.

It's a fact that it is easier to write programs in COBOL than it is in C++. No memory leaks, no dangling pointers, etc and it's natively integrated with the database and operating system.

It's a simple matter of economics: it costs less to design, construct, implement, maintain and re-tool the different components of a distributed system as opposed to that of a mainframe.

Quite simply, you are wrong. Plug in an IBM mainframe and it does what it says on the box, all fully integrated. It'll do what it was supposed to do, for decades if necessary, and when it's obsolete you can upgrade to a new one and your old software will run flawlessly first time, but faster. IBM proved this when they moved from 48-bit CPUs to 64-bit. As I have said before, this simply doesn't happen in the Unix world. A mainframe is a nuclear power station and a PC is the engine in your car. Sure you could use thousands and thousands of cars to generate the electricity for a city, but why would you?

Use Hercules! by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-21 23:33 · Score: 0

Use the hercules emulator and have your employer negotiate a deal for z/os licenses with IBM.
Herc works!

Cobol to JAVA, objects not pancea by ceCA · 2003-05-22 00:13 · Score: 1

I have taken java courses coming being an unemployed mainframe programmer. But how do u break into JAVA when u are 50+ and all u're experience is in COBOL, BAL, whatever. Everyone in Java is at most in 30's. It is basically impossible to break it. I would gladly switch to JAVA but I see no entry level jobs on the web. I have been keeping up with the progress of software technology. Though I see some advantages to object programming (derivation polymorphism), I am not convinced that object programming will be the solution to reliable software. I think that object programming has basically restored "spaghetti code" on the system design level. Basically if u make a design mistake in an object program u are dead!!! With the top down procedural programmin u could recover.

at 22 I'd done 24 months cobol by wadiwood · 2003-05-22 00:22 · Score: 1

And I'd rather gouge my eyes out with a blunt stick than do any more.

But that was a long long time ago in a city far far away (which is still full of mainframes - they're popular with federal government tax collectors, social security/welfare, banks and insurance).

So if you really want to go there, get a job with a large federal government department that counts lots and lots of money in lots and lots of little pieces (transactions), like tax or pensions. They'll even train you.

All you need to know right now is don't ever be really good at what you can't stand doing. Or only be good at what you like doing and be really really good at that.

And I wish I'd had "the programmer's survival guide - Career strategies for computer professionals" by Janet Ruhl ISBN 013-730375-0 when I started. The coding might be different but the corporate structures, options and techniques for getting ahead haven't changed much. I was way too idealistic and optimistic about doing things right when I was 22. All I did was annoy my jaded bosses, and I didn't know when to run and when to make a stand. Hmm, come to think of it, I still annoy my bosses, but my customers love me.

--

-- it must be true, it's on the internet.

cant read article by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-22 02:49 · Score: 0

I cant read article. I says something about
subscriber... Is it someone that has a pre-made
account or a mirror of the page?

(posted anon because I have done some moderating)

Re:cant read article by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-22 02:55 · Score: 0

Undoing moderation to Comment #xyz1
Undoing moderation to Comment #xyz2

FUCK! Next time Im gonna post from an other
IP where Im NOT LOGGED IN (And not just click "Post Anon").
Try to catch me then! bitch!

Re:Legacy-Unreality. by jedidiah · 2003-05-22 04:52 · Score: 1

Your comments are completely meaningless in the absence of any real cost comparisons.

Also, true robustness WILL be expensive since you have to be willing to duplicate every part of your system. This is above and beyond expensive disk subsystems, extra licensing costs for cluster versions of applications, backup/recovery software and more robust, data-center grade server hardware.

However, an 18 recovery window is more appropriate to the shop that chose to make no real commitment to disaster recovery beyond having a cheap DLT stacker.

Mainframes for all their hype, should at least be able to manage an order of magnitude improvement over a shoestring budget Sun shop.

If such a feat requires 2x of everything... well that's the cost of doing business for "real" production systems.

--
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.

COBOL Skills by TW+Burger · 2003-05-22 05:36 · Score: 1

I'm a COBOL programmer with mainframe experience that specializes in COBOL to Java/C++/VB/Internet interfaces and no one is trying to hire me - I work freelance and mostly write technical papers for a living.

This crisis of demand for and no supply of mainframe and COBOL people is media generated and does not exist.

Proves My Point! by Gonoff · 2003-05-22 05:42 · Score: 1

Shopping List

1 Dozen Eggs
48 Cans Beer
Big Jar of Coffee
Bottle of Milk

--
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.

can your migrate data to new storage? by mulp · 2003-05-22 07:02 · Score: 1

You're put in charge of a mainframe which runs 24/7 with a few days downtime a year that has 400 20GB disk drives in some sort of storage controller that does raid, etc.

Those 20GB drives are getting old and need to be replaced AND the database needs more storage space. So, the storage on the system is going to be upgraded to 100GB drives and some newer storage controllers are being added.

It will take a month just to jockey the new hardware into place and get it checked out and connected to the system. That will give you some extra storage so you can migrate data from old drives to new ones, so the old drives can be pulled and replaced with the new 100GB drives. Everything needs to be done without interrupting the 24/7 operation of the system.

When something goes wrong, and it will, you have to figure out within minutes whether the problem is with the application, the operator, the old hardware, the new firmware, the old firmware with the new drives, the new drive, the new controllers, the database software, the change to the database application, ....

No matter how clear it is to you that the problem is due to foo, the guy responsible for foo will argue that it has to be bar, wombat, or guano that caused the problem.

If you don't know all the details of every bit of hardware, software, and firmware in the entire system and application, you know enough about their architecture to know the way they operate and fail. And you know who the BS artists are and who the gurus are and when you can trust them to give you good information or actually fix the problem.

There are people who think they know Windows or linux.

There are people who _really_ know Windows or linux.

There are people who think they know Windows or linux applications for doing foo

There are people who _really_ know Windows or linux applications for doing foo

Then there are the people who know the really big Windows or linux application systems were implemented 25 years ago because they were involved then and have been involved for the past 25 years making the systems bigger and bigger and moving them from 25 year old technology to 20 to 15 to 10 to 5 year old technology. Often with 25 year old technology still mixed in with the 5 year old technology.

Then there is the new CIO who comes in and defines a strategy to switch from the old system to a grand new application system in 9 months.

That's where real job insecurity comes in - the old timers are never quite sure which contract house the will be required to work for or when the company will be bought out because the business is out of control, but he does know that he'll be working on that old mainframe application for another 3-5 years.

rpg? by layingMantis · 2003-05-22 11:10 · Score: 1

Rocket Propelled Grenade?

i've fragged my fair share in Goldeneye with it, but maybe they mean something else......

Not quite dead... by monsted · 2003-05-22 20:17 · Score: 1

... but you sure smell like it ;)

Ai mileipiteet omiasi? by CRConrad · 2003-06-04 07:38 · Score: 1

No kenen muuten ne pit&isi olla?

Mina &sikter &r ocks& mina egna.

(This stupid input parser seems to be eating well-formed HTML Scandahoovian-letter-codes, BTW.)

--

Christian R. Conrad
mail me at iki.fi ; same user ID as here

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Mainframe Techies Are A Dying Breed

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