After many years of writing Assembler and Cobol on a mainframe, I have seen a lot of technologies rolled out with big promises. THEY ALL FAILED.
I remember one time there was a product that let you code logic tables that would generate code. Management billed it as the solution to long lead times for changes and orderly development. It screwed everything up and took a long to get rid of it and get things back to normal. Then I worked for a vendor and had to attend change control meetings. Management complained about how long it took to get changes in and looked for other alternatives yet kept adding more restrictions On changes in the mainframe group. While Open systems attended the same meeting and when they were asked, do you have a backup plan, they said what's that. Management thought that was fine because they could get stuff done. But the biggest BOONDOGGLE of all times, was what management spent a few million on and that was Four Quadrant Leadership. If discussed something with another person and YOU made the change you were operating from Quadrant 1. If you discussed it with another persons and THEY did it you were operating from Quadrant 2. No one ever figured out whay it was important but everyone in the company had to take the course. We spent millions and the manager who bought it was called a VISIONARY. I suspect or should I say HOPE he is on the unemployment line with the rest of the visionaries. ________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> on behalf of scott Ford <idfli...@gmail.com> Sent: Sunday, October 15, 2017 2:22 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Somewhat Interesting Mainframe Article Ed, I agree with you. Machines are faster and faster. But customers are demanding changes to code and fixes faster. This to me is a problem, especially if 'caution is thrown to the wind'. Dealing with the security subsystem, I.e.; RACF, ACF2 and TOP-SECRET , many customers are ignorant of these products , especially in how and why they work. I write in COBOL and my first love Assembler, so we have exits that support our product. I have seen like everyone else a lot of craziness. The approach of using the PC and Java for everything to me is a cop out . This is the apparent trend I have been seeing. To this t-Rex this is not the only path to product development. Scott On Oct 15, 2017, 1:25 AM -0400, Edward Gould <edgould1...@comcast.net>, wrote: > > On Oct 14, 2017, at 8:50 PM, Clark Morris <cfmpub...@ns.sympatico.ca> wrote: > > > > > > As a retired systems programmer and applications programmer analyst > > whose primary languages were COBOL and Assembler, I have serious > > doubts about that statistic. There have been many successful > > migrations from the 360/370/390/z series systems. There also have > > been many successful if overly expensive migrations to SAP, Oracle, > > and the rest of the bunch. I would be amazed Facebook, Amazon, and > > Microsoft have any z series or BUNCH successor mainframes. Take a > > look at the job postings. Many applications systems, including ones I > > worked on needed to be redesigned and replaced. It could have been > > done in COBOL but getting management to buy into upgrading the way > > they do things to at least the 1985 standard and its facilities let > > alone anything later was too difficult. > > > > Clark Morris > > Clark: > > Look at it this way though. As machines get faster and faster, there is > little need to revamp (any) code. That is one of the issue now days. > management is just to happy so they do not have to rewrite code they just get > a bigger machine. Maybe that is the undoing of Z? > > Ed > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
