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Retired Mainframe Pros Lured Back Into Workforce
itwbennett writes "Businesses that cut experienced mainframe administrators in an effort to cut costs inadvertently created a skills shortage that is coming back to bite them. Chris O'Malley, CA's mainframe business executive VP, says that mainframe workers were let go because 'it had no immediate effect and the organizations didn't expect to keep mainframes around.' But businesses have kept mainframes around and now they are struggling to find engineers. Prycroft Six managing director Greg Price, a mainframe veteran of some 45 years, put it this way: 'Mainframes are expensive, ergo businesses want to go to cheaper platforms, but [those platforms] have a lot of packaged overheads. If you do a total cost of ownership, the mainframe comes out cheaper, but since the costs of a mainframe are immediately obvious, it is hard to get it past the bean-counters of an organization.'"
As early as 2002, I started to half-jokingly tell young co-workers that were asking that they should learn COBOL as a way to insure them a prosperous career. ;-) Back then, most schools were removing or had removed COBOL programming from their course list.
I was half-jokingly telling them that by 2015 they should be earning 150-200K a year as a simple COBOL developer ;-)))
See this article from last year saying basically the same thing :
http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/08/07/231774/cobol-programmer-shortage-starts-to-bite.htm
Note: I am to old to start to learn COBOL, this is stuff for young people... ;-)
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
I speak COBOL, FORTRAN and can do Job Control Language like an old pro, oh wait.
I also program in IBM 360/370 assembler. I'll bet that is almost a lost art.
If you'll excuse the shameless self promotion, this book teaches UNIX security people how to use Mainframes: http://www.amazon.com/Mainframe-Basics-Security-Professionals-Getting/dp/0131738569/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1202746607&sr=8-1
-- Support a free market in the field of government
I learned and taught cobol for awhile, and i can say that cobol is not too far from data entry. It is way too much work to do simple things, and it is way too weak of a language for most things. Its functionality is low that it takes a lot of code to implement simple things. The compiler gives you weird error messages. The language is archane. It is a very miserable language to write in, and I wouldn't code in it for less than several hundreds of dollars per hour, just because its so boring and takes way too much typing to do simple things that would be a snap in other languages.
If recruitment would be any easier if the offer included the right to shout "Where is your 'right-sizing' now, bitches?" into the face of the nearest PHB at will, in addition to the fat salary?
The Mainframe does it job and does it well. Nothing comes close in Data Throughput Processing with the amount of reliability that a mainframe brings.
Computer 'Experts' have been saying that the mainframe is dead since the early 90s, but here we are 20 years later and I still have a job programming for it, and I don't see it going away anytime soon. Small to mid-level servers just don't have the capacity to deal with the growing about of data generated. Fedex does in the neighborhood of 2 billion transactions a day, you cant just wipe together a Beowulf Cluster and think it will do the job reliably.
Or the better question is. How much do you trust the Federal Reserve to run all its processing on Windows machines. Or Wall Street. Ever consider if a transaction there is 'lost' because a windows blue screen? Even linux machines arent as dependable as a Mainframe. The IBM Z boxes actually have their own redundant parts included in them already. Not to mention that it will phone in its own tech support request.
Mainframes are not for everyone, but they do fulfill their job well when you do need them.
There are also enough tools out there like SOA so that even Java "Kids" can write applications for them easily.
Mainframes run the world.
Easier said than done, matey. Some of these systems are running engines that cause me to cower. I have had issues with SQL/Oracle databases and the financial apps of companies that can afford a few hours, or even days downtime. Systems where it was feasible to run two separate versions at once with duplicate data entry.
I've only run theoretical experiments with some of the systems in other companies I've worked at that COULDN'T go down, except for very special periods of time (easter and christmas and new years), oddly enough, enough of the world isn't working those weekends that you can shut down.
I can't imagine taking down the backends of the likes of Bank of America or Citibank. I lived through the quagmire that was the BankBoston/Fleet merger, and they fucked that up royally. And that's just merging systems, not wholesale replacement.
Good F*ing Luck to you.
We were just discussing VAX at work. I personally never got to work on one, but a guy I work with grew up learning on them. He said only guys his age really knew much about VAX and I said he was wrong as several guys I grew up with worked at banks that used them.
Mainfames are like Cobol, they aren't going away until the systems that use them die.
Uh, why?
Mainframes are fucking rock solid, reliable pieces of equipment.
They do the damned job like nobody's business.
The only issue with mainframes is that we haven't kept the people along with the software we chose to run on them decades ago.
from BSG: "Any return to COBOL will exact a price paid in blood."
I see VMWare bringing back a lot of the mainframe hardware concepts, such as: - Huge fricken box - Everything in the company runs on it As far as the "legacy" mainframe languages... IBM is still releasing OS updates to it's OS/400. Many business critical applications are still running strong in "legacy" programming languages like RPG. To name one... Bally's (yeah the same as the fitness center company) sells one of the leading CRMs in the Casino industry... running on a green console.
O'Malley said in 2000 there were more people in system programming than there are today despite the workloads having quadrupled which is quite an anomaly.
This is an actual sentence from the story. I guess reporters don't need to learn how to use clauses, and editors don't edit.
If E. B. White were alive today, he'd be spinning in his grave.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
There was a programmer back in the 1990's that didn't want to mess with the whole Y2K issue. So he cryogenically had himself frozen, hoping that some day (after Y2K) he would be revived and live out his days peacefully.
Some years later, sure enough he wakes up. Asking the nearest person what year it is, they reply, "It's the year 9999 and we need a COBOL programmer to help with this Y10K problem!"
Yeah, it's an old joke. Now GOML!
From The Tao of Programming:
There was once a programmer who worked upon microprocessors. ``Look at how well off I am here,'' he said to a mainframe programmer who came to visit, ``I have my own operating system and file storage device. I do not have to share my resources with anyone. The software is self- consistent and easy-to-use. Why do you not quit your present job and join me here?''
The mainframe programmer then began to describe his system to his friend, saying ``The mainframe sits like an ancient sage meditating in the midst of the data center. Its disk drives lie end-to-end like a great ocean of machinery. The software is as multifaceted as a diamond, and as convoluted as a primeval jungle. The programs, each unique, move through the system like a swift-flowing river. That is why I am happy where I am.''
The microcomputer programmer, upon hearing this, fell silent. But the two programmers remained friends until the end of their days.
I'd take a 370 assembler job, if they existed! I enjoyed that more than any other language I've worked with. Heck, even with the old OS that ususally accompanies such work - threads? preemptive multitasking? Who needs em!
From memory, IBM's 370 macros came with source and cool code was shared freely between mainframe shops.
People die. That's a fact you need to work into any business decisions that have impact for more than 10 years.
To replace people, you need new people. And new people like to work with new technology. Mainframes (the hardware) do their job damn well, but mainframes (the software) are stuck so far in the past you can't even see it. A memory that will always stick with me is seeing a nervous girl fresh out of college (maybe even in college) trying to explain to a room full of 60-year-olds an exciting new feature of the next release of COBOL- which I'm almost entirely sure was: A "FOR" LOOP (it may have even been a "for each" loop)
the software doesn't work because the software is good. It's not. The software works because so much is riding on it working- it's tested a LOT more than anything released on the web.
A website has an error, the people viewing that page are inconvenienced for five minutes while someone responds to an e-mail and removes a stray semicolon. A ten-thousand-transactions-per-second program has an error, and you've got problems.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
http://www.nypost.com/seven/06282009/news/regionalnews/nyc_hit_by_nerd_job_rob_176570.htm/
NYC HIT BY NERD JOB ROB
By SUSAN EDELMAN
June 28, 2009 --
It's a geek tragedy
While the city vows to save and create jobs for recession-ravaged New Yorkers,
one of its biggest contractors is importing techies from India, instead of
hiring local computer nerds.
-snip-
"It was a dream come true," said Sunny Amin, 25, who traveled from his Mumbai
home to the Big Apple -- his first US visit.
Amin, who has an engineering degree from a college in Aurangabad, landed his
first job with IBM-India.
-snip-
Finance spokesman Sam Miller defended the contract.
"Our systems are so old that there are not many companies that have the
ability to work on them. IBM does," he said.
Surprisingly, NY City can't find any American's to work on these COBOL systems, but 25 year olds in India have the experience necessary.
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
You know how Cobol is uber verbose? Guess who were programming way back when: female secretaries.
You see C with its almost autistic terseness? Who are using it? Buncha (male) nerds who can't talk.
What's my point?
I'll tell you after my next shot.
How much Scotch do I need to drink before I become an honorary Scot?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Actually it is a problem that we can't get and keep the boomers retired. We will be the squeezed generation because they will hang on until they die and by then the younger ones will be kicking us out. No generational mindsets can change until people leave the workforce.
-Xen
From experience, just because you migrate from a mainframe doesn't necessarily mean you migrate from COBOL.
In the last mainframe environment I worked in, we ditched the "Big Blue Box" and put everything on an IBM Z-Series server running SCO-Unix.
We just emulated the environment. The OS was the same old junk and COBOL was still a bear to deal with.
We were able to run 4 mainframe "environments" though from this itsy-bitsy (comparably) server though...
How many mainframes does Google run? How is their data throughput doing?
Every bank I worked for (and Telco, for that matter) does a reboot of it's Unix and Windows boxen, and a restart of the mainframe regions on Sunday morning. The systems are unavailable for 4-8 hours, depending on the system in question.
Software updates and patches are rolled immediately after that image backup and restart, so that there is an image to roll back to in case of problems.
Unlike your experience, Christmas/Year End is a "freeze" where only emergency patches can be done.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Odd by today's standards.
No flow-of-control stack. No local variables.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I went from UNIX in the late 1970's to mainframe zOS (MVS/OS) to VM and Linux on the mainframe. Anything you can do on an Intel box (or a room full of them), you can do on a mainframe, cheaper and more reliably, once you get past the first big financial hit. I've seen the so-called cost studies that supposedly show the room full of Intel white boxes are cheaper. Once you factor in the "unseen" costs, like the article says, and get past the startup, the mainframe looks VERY good.
Current mainframes aren't what people remember from the past. They're (physically) small, agile, and well suited to certain workloads (can you do 256 concurrent DMA transfers on an Intel box?). The problem is, the only companies that seem to be able to justify them for new workloads are ones that already have them for legacy work. IBM hasn't shown much interest in the low-end of the market (sell small boxen, then discontinue them, push licensed emulation, then kill it, etc).
Our biggest problem is finding people who know the technologies. I give classes to our Linux SA's on this, and they're usually surprised at what the current zSeries boxes can do.
Don't misunderstand, there are plenty of applications where Intel boxes make sense, I work both sides of the fence. I just hate to see mainframes maligned as "obsolete" by people who don't understand what they are now.
If I had to pick hardware and software as if my life depended on it - it would be an IBM mainframe with the latest and greatest version of MVS (or whatever the current name of it is) on it.
You not only have to know the application field pretty well (or have the bent to intuit it), but you will have to get used to living without local variables and to a one-call-deep call stack.
Don't ignore the naming conventions. It's what they do to work around the lack of re-entrance.
And never, never, never try anything fancy. If you can't keep the state machine in your head, trying to debug it interactively will eat your lunch and your breakfast, dinner, and midnight snacks, as well.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
How many banks are running on Google's systems?
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
VAX may be dead, but VMS is still very much alive. The popular OMX trading system runs on VMS/Itanium. It's the backend of many stock exchanges, including NASDAQ, ASX and HKEx derivatives. The systems seem very reliable with decent performance. (Definitely better than that .NET-based TradElect crap the LSE is now trying to drop like a hot potato.)
Yeah, I know it's an over-simplification, but do remember that your virtualization is one of the tools CoBOL programers use to get around its non-reentrant nature.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
heh.
Good analogy.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Also from the Tao of Programming: The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth to the assembler. The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages. Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language expresses the Yin and Yang of software. Each language has its place within the Tao. But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it.
FWIW, there have been a lot of attempts to modernize CoBOL, new coding environments, objects, etc.
I don't have enough experience with what they're doing (don't want to have that experience, I guess.) to know what they've done about reentrancy, but I suspect that the whole concept of reentrancy is foreign to the very people who like the grammar and syntax of CoBOL.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Are you sure CoBOL is no worse than C?
Or are you comparing apple fritters and ham sandwiches?
I have seen C written the way people write good CoBOL.
I have never seen CoBOL written like good C, and I know why.
Has something to do with something called reentrancy.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I have been tracking worldwide server revenues for a few years. Over the past 2-3 years the market share between Mainframe, UNIX, Linux and Windows has been very flat: Windows 40%, Unix 35% Linux 14%, mainframe (ZOS) 11% (IDC Worldwide Server Revenue marketshare).
Quarter Windows Linux UNIX ZOS
02/06 34.20% 12.60% 35.00%
03/06 34.40% 12.40% 34.20% 11.30%
04/06 34.90% 11.40% 33.50% 11.40%
01/07 38.80% 17.00% 35.00%
02/07 38.20% 13.60% 31.70% 9.50%
03/07 40.40% 13.40% 31.10%
04/07 36.60% 12.70% 33.20%
01/08 39.20% 13.70% 30.60% 8.40%
02/08 36.50% 13.40% 32.70% 11.80%
03/08 40.80% 14.00% 29.70% 9.40%
04/08 35.30% 13.60% 36.20%
01/09 37.30% 13.80% 33.10% 9.00%
ZOS is not always reported in press releases and I don't purchase the IDC report.
Looks like neither Mainframe or UNIX is dying, or that Linux is dominating.
Standard CoBOL is not reentrant.
Those coding standards are equivalent to having management do a full optimization pass on the pseudo-code and completely unrolling every call that goes more than one level deep.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Sounds great.
Except you must realize that you are essentially talking about decompiling a language that is already in many ways at assembly language level.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
...If you do a total cost of ownership, the mainframe comes out cheaper, but since the costs of a mainframe are immediately obvious, it is hard to get it past the bean-counters of an organization.
I've found this to be true of many aspects of IT, not just concerning mainframes. I've watched customers struggle to get decent performance and constantly hit limitations with a certain database product (not Oracle) because it was virtually free and they didn't want to spend the capital cost on an Oracle license. The total man hours spent, time lost, etc on getting their "free" db up to speed vastly exceeded the cost of the Oracle licenses and they still have problems with it.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Your point is reentrancy.
Reentrancy, and methods of managing complexity -- make a large state machine with a large grammar, or make a bunch of small state machines with small grammars?
Of course, C does allow you to code like a CoBOL programer.
The reverse is not true.
I don't drink, but I'll see if I can't get lost in the implications of applying this to gender concepts while I go take care of some shopping for my wife.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I've long been sold on mainframes, but they suffer from a scalability problem - they don't scale down that far.
Here I am, at a small, organically growing company. We've been growing about 25% - 75% per year, and with the economic slowdown, our growth has accelerated. (since we save our prospective clients money) We're too small to afford mainframes. We have about $50,000 invested in our primary hosting hardware now.
We are having to bust some humps to keep up with this year's growth. We've hit the performance wall of single-system limitations, and have been working furiously on full redundancy and clustering our databases and system stack, based on CentOS Linux, heartbeat, Postgres, and lots of application-level coding. (I turned it all on in production just 3 days ago!) We're still working out kinks with load balancers, round-robin DNS, dynamic database host selection, backup validation, network monitoring, and other similar issues. Mostly though, it's been going quite smoothly.
If our company continues its growth rate, in a few years, we'll be of a budget and company size that a mainframe or three just might be a good idea - but at that point, we'll have invested enough in our current redundant clustering technology that we'll be architecturally unfit for adopting mainframes whole-hog. Instead, we'll have racks and racks of small, cheap, multi-core commodity 1U servers built with network-level redundancy and auto-failover. Not because it's the best for large scales, but because it's the best that we can afford now, and as we grow, we'll add to what we have rather than re-invent the wheel.
If they made mainframes that could scale down to a price comparable to a $1,000, cheap, 1U SATA Linux server, (where my company started years ago, though we've long moved on) and could scale up seamlessly to big iron, that would just rock.
The closest equivalent I'm aware of right now is using IBM's ZOS to host virtual linux hosts, which strikes me as inefficient, even though that's where my development path just might leave us. But I don't know anything about it, and we're too small for anybody to bother (timewise) with, even if we are a million-dollar/year company.
Are you listening, mainframe vendors?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Most of the experts going on about mainframes being dead were talking about the vt-100 on every desk connected to a timeshare. They were right as far as that went, but they forgot about the massive back end processing aspect entirely and they failed to anticipate client-server.
This may be a little pedantic, but this isn't a question of mainframes vs non-mainframes. It's about mainframe software. People buy mainframes one to support 10k transaction per second processes, and second because you can't afford to drop any of those transactions. Thusly, the software that sits on top of that mainframe needs to be perfectly reliable, and when it is, you don't change it unless you absolutely have to. It means even when new, fun, fancy languages come out, we still have to maintain that huge catalog of reliable software, because we can't afford the pain of migrating, even if it means paying someone 6 figure salaries.
The software also works because the OS is inherently predictable, stable, and fault tolerant. It just works right.
Contrast that with the Windows universe, where things just don't work sometimes, and the admin's first response is often to reboot.
I'm not saying Linux is any better; I'm honestly not sure. I know the Windows systems at work give us no end of troubles, whereas the old Unix systems are orders of magnitude more stable. The only place I use Linux at work is an old version of Red Hat on a file server almost nobody uses; it's been rock-solid, but the Ubuntu here at home is increasingly flaky.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
But I bet google loses lots of data. They certainly have had massive amounts of down time (by main frame standards).
search from 2 places, different results. They don't have highly critical data, so they can sloppily store and syncronize as needed. A liberty that Fedex does not.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Don't get me wrong. Mainframe hardware is great for big database/large I/O type work. But the reason we tried to get away from hosting things on mainframes was what we referred to as 'the mainframe mindset'. Everything was a batch job, placed into a scheduling queue and done in its own good time. Any attempt to get our IT people to re-engineer the processes met screams and the "you just don't understand" howls reminiscent of leaving the toilet seat up at home. So we (engineering) bought a little Sun server and built our own engineering configuration control system.
We took a data release process that ran once a week (because the mainframe guys said it had to wait its turn behind the budget report jobs) and converted it to a "just in time" process. As a result, we eliminated a bunch of error prone, paper based interim change processes. No longer needed, since there was no longer any need to track changes made between weekly "release points". The factory loved us. The correct data was on line (web-based, which was something the mainframe people didn't 'get'). QA kissed our feet, not having to chase paper changes effective since the last batch run. But the IT guys screamed and pointed out how, if scaled up, the Sun server solution would be more expensive than a mainframe. If everyone went out and bought their own. So management went back to the mainframe. And the weekly batch job.
The new process could have been built on a DB hosted on that mainframe. But we never could pry the old, boney, arthritic hands of our IT department off the system. So whatever ran on the big iron had to run their way. So lets keep the mainframes. But retire the geezers.
Whew! That sure was cathartic.
Have gnu, will travel.
I used them in school in the 80s; know about channels, VMs, CICS, MVS etc... but what makes them a distinct entity? How is an E10K not a mainframe? Is it just EBCDIC and old system software?
If it is just EBCDIC and old system software; shouldn't the article read "even IBM can't figure out how their computers work", at least as a byline?
COBOL is just another language; any poor sod that had their head stuffed into the C++/JAVA/C# grinder should find it a welcome break. A bit like a tricycle rather than an oceanliner, but a vehicle that can actually move.
Please define "revenues" as I haven't paid anything to install Linux on any of my Linux servers... EVER. Conversely, this year alone I have spent around $25,000 on various Windows Server licenses.
Does this mean that Windows has 100% "market share" in my server rooms?
I read this exact story in '98. Y2K. All those mainframes with COBOL code and nobody to write it because CompSCI majors didn't learn it anymore.
We always seem to muddle through.
According to a relative "the mainfame is dead" was one of the selling points of minicomputers in the 1970s. That makes the meme older than most readers here.
Have you looked at Hercules? It's a great mainframe emulator. It will run MVS, ZOS and in a wierd configuration you could host it on a 1U server running Linux, bring up ZOS, and then run Linux under ZOS.
Revenues are the money paid for the server hardware, not the OS. Sources of the survey are a large sample of customers worldwide who report server purchases and the OS installed on them (amongst other things). The results are correlated with vendor reports of sales.
The point was that the server wasn't sold with Linux, he installed it.
So basically it's a false report.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
The specialized hardware is what makes a z/Series machine appealing. If you wanted to run Z/OS for any real purposes, you still need licenses, and good luck talking IBM into selling one without a bundled HW/SW/support contract.
Now, if what you're talking about is a migration strategy in preparation for real iron, I can dig it. I even put together a Live environment to that end.
Sounds interesting; what does it mean?
Mr. Balmer go back to bed, you can count your stock options tomorrow to feel better.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
As an authority on windows you might speak on its benefits.
As someone who cannot get any of the many distros to run at all ...
while millions of other ppl can I am going to jump to the conclusion
that one or all of the following happened
1) Didn't bother to read any of the various walk thru sites.
2) Didn't bother to ask for help from anyone that does know linux.
3) Didn't check the HCL as it is called in Windows.
Doing anyone of the 3 would have likely allowed you to achieve Linux newb status.
So as something less than a linux newb, you cannot really make statements as to
Linux and its reliability.
Linux is more stable as an OS, just a simple fact.
I will grant you that a Windows install for the uninformed is easier.
I will also say this, some of the linux ppl do not want the windows crowd
invading their space, and I can sympathize with them after working
in various support roles for close to 20 years.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Finding people who know how to properly use oracle is a real bear. Sure, you can hire people with oracle experience, but most of them were the 'corporate DBA' types who don't know how to do anything out side of the script. I can't tell you how many clients I've seen struggling with their oracle installs; either because the system does not perform as promised, or because the 'cluster' needs to be rebooted every time one node crashes in an unexpected manner.
Now, I'm just the Linux janitor, not a DBA, but when I see those problems on MySQL or PostgreSQL, I can fix them. I've replaced more than one MSSQL database with a MySQL setup, and often see orders of magnitude speed increases that I suspect are due to misconfiguration of the proprietary database. The open-source stuff is just plain easier to use, at least for Linux janitors like me, and has better support.
I'm sure Oracle and MSSQL are both fine databases if you know how to use it and you configure it correctly; I'm just saying that paying a lot of money doesn't relieve you from needing to know those things. You still need to pay for a technician who actually understands it. The advantage of the free (as in freedom) products is that there are a whole lot more people with real (that is, non-scripted, where you need to do something new or are expected to solve a problem beyond 'reboot and apply the redo logs') experience with the free databases than with multi-million dollar oracle installs, and that sometimes your expensive support people just shrug and say 'I don't know. why don't you upgrade your linux kernel.'
Sticking with the free stuff, using a search engine such as google gets you pretty good support for commonly used free software. Often better support than what you get when you pay lots of money for support.
Note that both Linux and AIX/Solaris (UNIX) can run on in VMs on Z/OS, so some of those UNIX and Linux figures are likely to be mainframes too. Some other mainframe manufacturers ship with UNIX too.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'm too lazy to Google it, but if the language is so arcane and simplistic, wouldn't it be worthwhile to write a COBOL code generator so you can write code in something that doesn't suck? I realize that code generators are not always as expressive and/or sometimes don't follow conventions of said generated language, but getting 90% of the job done has to be better than trying to lure some old codgers out of their kid's basement right?
body massage!
I remember that, was called departmental computing. I had friends that laughed at me when I went into mainframes in the early 80's and the mainframes were going to be gone in a few years. Here it is 20+ years later and I still work with mainframes. I got into the networking side and I still do mainframe networking along with distributed networking.
Talk to IBM about renting time and space on one of their mainframes. Timesharing was for mainframes to solve your exact problem. Eventually you can upgrade to your own.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.