Posted by Mike on Wednesday, July 6, 2011 - 231 views
Some Fun With Numbers Reveals the Ambiguity of the IT World
One of the major IT stories today involves a technology that grew almost 70% year-on-year and practically doubled its market share.
The other involves something that a major research company thinks will only command about 5% of the market in 2015.
The first sounds like a clear-cut winner. The other sounds like something that is dying on the vine.
The first of these is the IBM mainframe; the other is Cloud Computing.
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Posted by Trevor Eddolls on Saturday, June 25, 2011 - 274 views
After years of sliding my security card in the lock and entering the machine room/data centre and seeing the mainframes in there change from Sci-Fi-style boxes with flashing lights to more mundane-looking boxes. From seeing simple DASD with less capacity than the memory stick in this laptop be replaced with cache controllers and more sophisticated data storage devices. It always seemed that there were plenty of mainframes around and any normal person (me) was constantly being offered tours round installations. So it comes as a bit of a shock when a youngster clearly has no idea what a mainframe looks like or what it does!
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Filed Under: cobol
Posted by Mike on Monday, June 13, 2011 - 260 views
IBM celebrates a century of innovation and transformation
IBM Corp., which celebrates its centennial this month, has achieved remarkable success over the years by developing innovative technology products and services and by continuing to transform its brand to adapt to a changing world.
The company was founded on June 16, 1911, as Computing Tabulating and Recording (CTR) Co., making such products as punch-card tabulators, commercial scales and clocks.
Three years later, the founders recruited Thomas J. Watson Sr. from National Cash Register Co. to be president-CEO. He led the company for 42 years, changing its name to International Business Machines in 1924 to reflect its global expansion.
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Posted by Mike on Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - 308 views
By Murray Hill, For Postmedia News
I’ve been writing a weekly technology column for over twenty years and the time has come to move on. I retired from my “real” job in the fall, and have found that the busy time of retirement makes writing more and more difficult, so it’s time to say goodbye.
I’ve often been asked what my top ten tech products of all time would be, so what better time to do that than my last column? So here goes.
Posted by Mike on Monday, May 23, 2011 - 532 views
A 1963 photo of an IBM model 1410 mainframe computer at AMP in Sydney. Source: Australian IT
DEMAND for 50-year-old mainframe language skills is likely to stay high for at least this decade because the computing technology remains ubiquitous in large organisations.
Recruiters and analysts say those with mainframe skills such as COBOL and FORTRAN, a programming language created in the 1950s, are being lured out of retirement to meet the demand.
Corporate Australia and government agencies are major users of COBOL on mainframes.
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Posted by Trevor Eddolls on Monday, March 7, 2011 - 590 views
2011 has been dubbed by some as the year of the cloud – the year when cloud computing comes off the PowerPoint slides and onto a computer near you. Others have muttered wisely about similarities with client-server computing, which for many years was the ‘technology of the future’ at every presentation and never quite arrived the way we were promised.
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Filed Under: cobol
Posted by Trevor Eddolls on Sunday, February 27, 2011 - 1,147 views
I don’t know whether you’re going to be at the SHARE conference in Anaheim (California) from 27 February to 4 March, but one of the interesting things to see is the William Data Systems stand (booth 211).
They are showing how their ZEN z/OS network management suite of product integrates with popular smart phone technology – Apple, Blackberry, and Android. What you’ll see is ZEN monitoring z/OS networks and then reporting the results to a mobile device. The user can then evaluate what’s happening on the mainframe and take appropriate action immediately. As a consequence, z/OS support staff can get on with their lives and be out and about, but still be able to monitor their mainframes and react to alerts.
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Filed Under: cobol
Posted by Mike on Wednesday, February 9, 2011 - 309 views
The City Council voted to approve funding to upgrade a computer mainframe system that’s more than 35 years old.
The $3.5 million technology upgrade will bring the city’s business into the Internet age, ending the need to rely on 2.6 million lines of coding necessary to update the website.
The city’s chief information officer, Peter Wallace, had warned that Chesapeake’s information technology was long out of date and recently said he was worried about a future “total breakdown” related to antiquated technology: police radios that couldn’t send alerts, power outages shutting down the city’s information grid and a technology work force retiring with no one qualified to replace them.
COBOL, the program the city has been using, is not taught in schools anymore, which makes hiring new employees a challenge, Wallace said.
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Filed Under: cobol
