At 10:46 AM 11/16/2007, you wrote:
...
Hopefully, you are aware that IBM does not control SHARE in any
way. It is a user group, made up of volunteers who are constantly
scrambling for other volunteers to help out. If any faculty from
NIU would like to help, I'm very sure they won't be turned
away. The zNextGen project in particular is very short of people.
It wasn't the zNextGen Project itself to which I referred. The
session I had in mind was run by the Academic Initiative IBMers, and
NIU faculty were, in fact, turned away by the session chair (an
IBMer). His quite reasonable explanation was that the session
already had four panelists and there was no time for another to
participate. But he has long known of NIU's program, and still no
NIU faculty were invited. That was my point.
Your note only talked about an MP3K at NIU. Does NIU currently have
a z/Architecture machine?
No, and it likely never will, as the last NIU mainframe will probably
be gone in a couple of years. In fact, my new job is my first
opportunity to write code for z/Architecture, and especially z/OS.
-snip-
> What a
> shame if z/OS won't be installed, as I believe
> many assume IBM's promise for 2010 is intended to
> include preparation in z/OS, not just Linux and z/VM.
The Linux part is more likely to attract young people. Once we've
got them working and learning about mainframes, z/OS is just a short
step away. It's not the specific OS that matters, it's a whole
bunch of other things, as Alan Altmark talked about. I think one he
left out was "discipline," the bugaboo of midrange computing. If
enough students come out of school with some idea of being an IT
professional means having change control, problem management, etc.
skills, everyone will win.
I certainly agree wholeheartedly with your last statement. Whether
z/OS is a short step away from Linux and z/VM can be debated, but the
real issue for most of the companies which hire NIU CS graduates is
their need for skilled employees who understand what I call
'large-scale enterprise computing' . That's the kind of graduate the
NIU CS program has long been producing, and NIU CS believes that z/OS
and its predecessors are the environment in which that is best learned.
However, I should also say that NIU CS has also used VM/370,
maintained by me for many years. (FWIW, I also enjoyed experimenting
with CP-67 on NIU's 360/67.) No one was happier than I was to see VM
come back from the brink with the success of z/Linux (to which I
admit very little understanding). I expect that ISU CS students will
get a lot out of their experience.
Mark Post
Michael Stack
Product Developer
NEON Enterprise Software, Inc.
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