On 21 Oct 2013 11:21:15 -0700, in bit.listserv.ibm-main you wrote: >News Flash: The Mainframe (Still) Isn't Dead > >A very-much-alive Mark Twain famously commented that reports of his >death were greatly exaggerated. > >Mainframers know that the same is true (and always has been) regarding >reports and predictions of the mainframe's death, including Stewart >Alsop's unwise 1991 suggestion in InfoWorld that the last mainframe >would be unplugged in 1996, immortalized by the Computer History Museum. ><http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/mainframe-computers/7/182/734>
But is it a product of the future as opposed to being a cash cow given only relatively modest upgrades? After reading some of Lynn Wheeler about the relative power of the EC12 compared to the Intel chips and to other architectures, I have to wonder. Lynn's description of the speed of FICON compared to other "channel" architectures is not encouraging. Since I don't think either Amazon or Google have built their empires using z series, there is cause to wonder how long existing applications are going to last. I know that I worked at a shop that had migrated from MVS to HP-UX using UNI-KIX, UNI-SPF, Microfocus COBOL and various shells including one that had gdg capability. They also had SYNCSORT with capability I wish had been available on the mainframe (I could define fields in a record and then sort on those field or use a COBOL record definition for getting the field names and descriptions). Clark Morris > >http://www.share.org/p/bl/ar/blogaid=256 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
