Tron Guy Says Tron: Legacy Almost Drove Him to Tears

Posted by Mike on Friday, December 17, 2010 - 324 views

I’ve been waiting 28 years to see if the other shoe would ever drop on the Tron universe. It has, and the result is visually stunning, intellectually engaging and emotionally exhausting.

As you might imagine, Tron: Legacy, which opens Friday, was a must-see movie for me. When the original Tron came out in 1982, I had just begun working as a mainframe systems programmer. I’d been working with computers for a decade, first in school and then professionally, so I knew a fair bit about them. Tron fascinated me because it was the first attempt to show what happens inside a computer. In doing so, it pushed the boundaries of filmmaking, both technically and artistically, in just about every way imaginable.

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One firm’s story: The mainframe goes, but Cobol stays behind

Posted by Mike on Wednesday, April 21, 2010 - 342 views

Owens & Minor moves Cobol-based ERP system to x86 server, Windows machines

A lot of Cobol-based applications have a plot line similar to the first Star Trek movie.

In it, the crew of the Enterprise discovers a huge, intelligent cloud they called “V’ger.” It turns out (plot spoiler alert), though, that V’ger was an unmanned spacecraft called Voyager that had been launched from Earth some 300 years earlier and then readapted by alien forces.

That Star Trek movie was released in 1979. The Cobol-based ERP application suite used by Owens & Minor Inc., a medical supply company, began its life in the 1980s as a packaged application. Over time, the company adapted the ERP software to meet its specific needs, creating a highly customized system with 10 million lines of code. (READ MORE)