Fortunately, this sort of thing could never happen today

Posted by Mike on Thursday, August 19, 2010 - 33 views

It’s the mid-1970s, and this programmer pilot fish works for an IT service provider that supports several big insurance companies.

“We ran a huge (at that time) mainframe and a nationwide network and, of course, a large computer room,” says fish.

Read the rest of the Shark Tank here.

Shark Tank – Just our way of showing we care

Posted by Mike on Thursday, March 11, 2010 - 215 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!