5 old-school ideas that weren’t so bad: what we miss about MIS
Posted by Mike on Friday, December 31, 2010 - 205 views
Cobol was king and MIS ruled from on high — some old-school tech management practices we’d like to see revived. READ ON
Cobol Coders: Going, Going, Gone?
Posted by Mike on Wednesday, March 24, 2010 - 221 views
Many IT managers slowly migrating away from Cobol wonder whether they’ll run out of Cobol programmers before they run out of Cobol code.
Cobol, that mainstay of business programming throughout the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, is not going away anytime soon. In a Computerworld survey early this year of IT managers at 352 companies, 62% of the respondents reported that they actively use Cobol. Of those, three quarters said they use it “a lot” and 58% said they’re using it to develop new applications. READ MORE
Shark Tank – Just our way of showing we care
Posted by Mike on Thursday, March 11, 2010 - 345 views
Flashback to the 1980s, when IBM is still shipping source code for big-iron internals, says this mainframe pilot fish.
“IBM discontinued supporting BTAM under CICS, but we had a major customer who communicated via CICS BTAM,” fish says.
Translation: The big customer uses the CICS transaction-processing system, and connects to it over telecommunication lines using the very old BTAM protocol — and IBM has just stopped supporting that approach. READ MORE
Editor’s note: Sharky is one of my favorite ComputerWorld features!
Hailing the death cab for Cobol
Posted by Mike on Tuesday, January 19, 2010 - 125 views
Baby Boomers are about to begin retiring en masse. So … who will mind the mainframe?
