On 21/06/2013 10:52 AM, Wayne Bickerdike wrote:
IBM already provide access to z/OS to Universities teaching z/OS /
z/VM in the IBM Academic Initiative via the Dallas RDP systems.
I taught several units at Canberra university here in Australia. The
class sizes varied between 8 and 20 students. Units were offered as
part of a Masters IT degree, with specialization in mainframe.
I covered z/VM, Unix Systems Services, DB2/COBOL programming, REXX/CICS.
Hopefully there will be some mainframe jobs for those students when they
graduate? It's looking pretty thin right now
in all states in Australia. It's hard to imagine a fresh faced graduate
choosing DB2/COBOL over node.js/Redis/mongoDB etc in this
day and age. And who can blame them.
The advantage of the Dallas systems is that they are looked after by
IBM professional systems programmers. The zPDT has some of the
overheads of a bigger box, whereas the z/VM hosted z/OS virtual LPARS
have all the maintenance done for you.
But then your students won't learn anything about how to maintain a
mainframe. We need sysprogs as well as COBOL programmers.
On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 8:50 PM, David Crayford <dcrayf...@gmail.com> wrote:
Maybe IBM can offer uni's a version of zPDT that can run on multi-socket
rack servers so they don't have to subsidize hardware, only software.
I'm sure that would be more than capable for running z/OS with more than
acceptable performance.
On 19/06/2013 4:22 PM, Timothy Sipples wrote:
Yes, sorry about that. Well, the problem probably got fixed ~10 years ago.
Which is better than, say, ~5 years ago.
It is my faded-memory impression that it was, as Timothy pointed
out, DEC's aggressive push of very low-cost and free "stuff" into
universities that both permitted and accelerated the rise of *ix
and also contributed to the decline of IBM mainframes on campus
(though that was not the only reason).
My recollection is that DEC didn't really want it that way. DEC would have
very much preferred if VMS and/or TOPS-10/20 got more popular in academia.
Sure, DEC was happier if BSD UNIX ran on their PDP or VAX hardware rather
than somebody else's hardware, but in hindsight that wasn't enough.
It's impossible to re-run history, but I suspect that if DEC didn't
provide
subsidized hardware to run AT&T's/BSD's operating system then there'd just
be some other subsidized hardware performing the same role. It would have
been something of early 1970s vintage that competed with the PDP-11. Maybe
something from CDC, Data General, or Honeywell/Prime. There was also a
fortuitous bit of DARPA funding aimed at Berkeley that helped UNIX at a
critical stage in its evolution.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Timothy Sipples
GMU VCT Architect Executive (Based in Singapore)
E-Mail: sipp...@sg.ibm.com
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