On Thursday, 07/27/2006 at 10:01 EST, Mike Walter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I beg to differ, Jim. Many list subscribers and I still regularly use the > old green-screen IBMLink and will continue to do so until they pry it from > my cold, dead fingers.
Move past it, Mike. ;-) No one is going to hire 3270 application developers to maintain the old IBMLink. When we *really* get old, we can rock back and forth on the front porch sipping ... lemonade ... reminiscing about the Good Ol' Days when computers were really slow, displayed only text, and you could get really amazing art on a line printer. (I'm envisioning another round of Pepsi(R) versus Coke(R) commercials....) There are a whole bunch of people in the industry who search for and apply fixes to their systems without needing 3270 applications to do it, and there are more of them than there are of us 3270-types. They're younger, too. [Read: They will outlive us.] I would like to leverage *their* "skill" at applying maintenence to System z. Remember, someday one of those Young Pups will be running your system, not you. :-) They're good at navigating all those hidden click-throughs on those web pages. Likewise, it would be great if the skill you have about applying fixes to systems (change control, careful screening) could be applied to other platforms as well. Of course, they use GUI tools. We are participating in a variety of activities that propose to simplify the management of z/VM systems, including patch management. And if it help you sleep better at night, let me say that Shop zSeries is not part of the solution, though the big content engines behind it are (as they have been through the ages). IMO, buying software and patching it are two different processes that don't deserve to be mashed together into the same tool. Alan Altmark z/VM Development IBM Endicott
