Great article, and nice picture, too. <rant> I happen to disagree with the author's use of the word legacy in some places. If I understand correctly, legacy means outdated. Hardware, such as an IBM 360 or a PDP-9 can be legacy. A file format, such as ISAM which is no longer supported, I would think of as legacy. You could have legacy data on punch cards or paper tape.
I'm talking about legacy the adjective, not the noun as in "IBM Mainframes have a long legacy." I would contend that if you have, for example, some assembler payroll modules that were written in 1988 and still run today, then they aren't legacy until you stop using them. Is IEFBR14 legacy code? I don't think so. Is this just nit picking? I don't think so because using legacy as an adjective has a very negative connotation and is used so often to bash the mainframe. Now I don't think for a second in this article that is being done. Even the title Legacy Matters is an excellent description of what IBM has accomplished. I cannot prove it, but I'm quite sure that the reason when I see written legacy machines, legacy data and the mainframe all mentioned together I automatically think it implies that they are at this time busy migrating everything over to windows servers, and this is all due to clever marketing that happened 10 years ago or more. I'm not picking on this article. The only thing that they said that I thought was illogical was referring to legacy software, and I think that if it is old but still used it shouldn't be considered legacy. That's a nit. What I am not happy with is how many times I see in technical literature, powerpoints and other places the words legacy and mainframe used together. What about, say, the software program I bought for Windows 98 that doesn't run on XP? Now that's legacy! Ok, sorry, I had to get that out of my system. </rant> Lindy -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of William Richter Sent: 12. heinäkuuta 2007 2:53 To: [email protected] Subject: Legacy matters FYI. Interesting article: Legacy matters: why the IBM mainframe continues to thrive http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070711-legacy-matters-why-the-ibm- mainframe-continues-to-thrive.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
