The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers as well.
[email protected] (Scott) writes: > With a cheaper job market, now is the time to hire hands to go through your > massive libraries of copy-and-paste COBOL and begin some initial > design/development of Java libraries. in the 70s & 80s ... there was addition of "real-time" transactions to a lot of the financial infrastructures ... but they frequently were only front-end that started the transaction for after hrs "batch settlement" window. slightly related past post http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008p.html#27 Father Of Financial Dataprocessing i.e. commit paradigms providing auditors the level of trust in computerized implementations ... vis-a-vis paper. in the 90s, there were billions spent on development of "straight through processing" efforts (eliminating overnight batch settlement by taking every transaction straight through to completion) ... leveraging large number of parallel "killer micros" and object-orieinted parallelization technology. the issue was that with increasing business and globalization ... the amount of work that needed to be done in the "overnight batch window" was increasing while globalization was decreasing the size of the window. most of the projects were eventually declared a success and disappeared ... it was very late into several of the efforts when they got around to do any speeds&feeds and found that the parallelization technology was increasing overhead by a factor of 100 times (compared to the batch cobol implementations) ... totally swamping any of the anticipated throughput improvements from the parallel killer macros. we saw some proposals for re-engineering activities in the middle part of this decade ... that were scuttled because the decision makers still hadn't recovered from the failed efforts in the 90s. a few recent posts in threads on such re-engineering efforts: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#87 Cleaning Up Spaghetti Code vs. Getting Rid of It http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#43 Business process re-engineering http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#14 Legacy clearing threat to OTC derivatives warns State Street http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#55 Cobol hits 50 and keeps counting http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#1 z/Journal Does it Again http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#2 z/Journal Does it Again http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009i.html#21 Why are z/OS people reluctant to use z/OS UNIX? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009l.html#57 IBM halves mainframe Linux engine prices http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009m.html#81 A Faster Way to the Cloud http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#81 big iron mainframe vs. x86 servers -- 40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
