A bit more from me.... The IBM Learning System is also available if you'd like to go grab a free z/OS account to "kick some tires" (and with no service level commitment). The 2020-2021 "Master the Mainframe" contest has ended in terms of prizes and awards, but you can still try the contest exercises and earn "digital badges."
https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/z/education/master-the-mainframe Some of exercises cover Python, Ansible, and Zowe, as examples. Ansible was born in 2012, Zowe in 2018. Python technically began in 1991, but it took a fairly long time to mature and get popular. There's a Slack channel where you can ask questions about the IBM Learning System and the various exercises. If recent past history is a guide (no guarantees) the IBM Learning System will probably go offline sometime in August, 2021, and then pop up again, refreshed, sometime in September, 2021, for the 2021-2022 contest. The 2021-2022 contest will have a new name. There are at least a few technologies you can probably safely "erase from your memory banks," or at least reduce allocations for. As David alluded to, SNA protocols, and even (perhaps, notionally) some pre-SNA protocols, are still supported. However, in typical operational practice, you can function quite well knowing at least a great deal less about these network protocols. Nowadays Enterprise Extender knowledge is plenty, if you even need that, since EE is where SNA is rapidly converging -- or already has, really. All the AnyNet variants are gone. There are some ancient access methods that are now only historical, and HFS is rapidly disappearing if not gone in most installations. There's no more ESA/390 (or prior) IPL, no Basic Mode (only LPARs of various types), no Sysplex timer boxes (they're now onboard as Server Time Protocol), and even the physical Hardware Management Console (HMC) can now be a virtual/integrated one on the IBM z15/LinuxONE III models. Work is well underway to make the HCD/IOCDS stuff much simpler, chiefly via Dynamic Partition Manager. Parallel (bus/tag) and ESCON channels have disappeared, although if you really need to connect an old device you still can courtesy Optica's equipment. Copper Ethernet is all full duplex 1000BASE-T now, with no more 10 or 100 -- and nothing to configure in that respect. No more Token-Ring or coax either. You don't need to worry about classic Microsoft Windows-style CIFS/SMB network file sharing or TCPBEUI since that's all been retired in favor of NFS. We're way past all the "bimodal accommodation" stuff for 64-bit toleration, and you haven't even been able to run z/OS in anything other than z/Architecture (64-bit) mode since z/OS 1.6 (released in 2004). The BookManager family of products has (sadly perhaps) receded, but you can still open and read a .BOO document on a PC if you need to. Related to those huge memory sizes, you can forget about treating every byte as precious; they aren't any more, not that much. System memory is quite inexpensive now, and if you can buy nontrivially greater processing efficiency using more memory you should take that deal every time. But 20+ years of favorable economic evolution and performance tuning have changed CPU thinking, too (or should have). For example, today's Db2 on average is a heck of a lot more processor efficient than 2001's DB2, which is pretty remarkable really. COBOL, too (Enterprise COBOL 6.3), as another notable example. OpenSSH is quite important on z/OS, and that's new compared to 2001. In 2001 parsing and generating XML was important, but now JSON is much more important while XML is still supported. z/OS supported Unicode even back in 2001, but z/OS is typically storing and managing much more Unicode data in 2021 -- and doing it much better. EBCDIC codepages are still supported, of course. There's something called Metal C that can be a great alternative to Assembler, if you wish. Naturally HLASM is still supported and keeps evolving. On balance there are many more (and more interesting) "freebies" available for z/OS. The 2020 edition of my list is available here: https://community.ibm.com/community/user/ibmz-and-linuxone/blogs/timothy-sipples1/2020/10/15/mainframe-freebies Welcome back! :-) - - - - - - - - - - Timothy Sipples I.T. Architect Executive Digital Asset & Other Industry Solutions IBM Z & LinuxONE - - - - - - - - - - E-Mail: sipp...@sg.ibm.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
