How's the mainframe market these days?

[hobotivo]

If it was integrated was it Woolies?

Not exactly, it was Westpac Bank, but Woolies (and BP service stations) were our first partners in the pilot. This was about 1986/7... No integration yet, the checkout chicks would manually enter the transaction into the POS machine directly from their abacus.
Cheers
Ron

[hobotivo]

You'll find that nearly every bank has a mainframe somewhere. I'm inundated with mainframe offers Europe wide.

I would be surprised if there is *any* bank which does not depend on mainframes for their day to day transaction processing, and that goes for airlines and government departments too. Nothing can touch the mainframe for pure reliability.

Sure, you can use massive clusters of PC's for applications like Google - who really cares if a given search returns consistent results on Google, so long as the result is "more or less" right - but that won't cut it in the world of finance. It has to be 100% right, 100% of the time!

At my current site we're actually reversing the trend by moving our File and Print servers from Windows to Samba under Suse Linux running on IFL engines on our z900 M/F. I think you'll find that the mainframe is a long way from dead, sure the death of the M/F has long been predicted, but it ain't happened yet.

But I can understand where some people might get the idea that all the mainframes have "gone away". Here in Aus you don't see a lot of M/F jobs advertised either, but they are there, nevertheless. What happens is that the jobs tend to be filled by direct poaching by agencies who work in that particular market. In the last 20 years every job I've had has been offered to me directly, I never even read the job adverts except to see what skills are "hot".

Another thing too are rates, I know I make twice as much per hour as somebody who writes a program by clicking it up on a GUI because we hire them too, and I know that, boring though it may seem, knowing arcane methodologies like JCL and PL/I puts the jam on my bread and butter.

Mainframers... We run the computers that run the world!

Cheers
Ron

[Fleetwood]

Mainframers... We run the computers that run the world!

Sure do...

[Cowboy Bob]

Another thing too are rates, I know I make twice as much per hour as somebody who writes a program by clicking it up on a GUI because we hire them too, and I know that, boring though it may seem, knowing arcane methodologies like JCL and PL/I puts the jam on my bread and butter.

Mainframers... We run the computers that run the world!

Ahhhh. A mainframe snob. It's not programming unless you've got a greenscreen and you enter code with edlin?

It may surprise you to know that there are many of us who are just as comfortable on AS400/Linux/Unix/Windows/etc and you'll find the key to contracting is diverse knowledge and being instantly comfortable in whatever environment you find yourself in.

BTW, I've done some CICS programming before, but not on a mainframe. There are high-level APIs available in numerous languages that mean direct CICS development is becoming more and more rare. Don't rest on your laurels...

[DimPrawn]

Mainframes ain't going away for a number of reasons. Reliability, backward compatibility and security.

I think the mainframe will outlive the mainframers as they are all old bastards.

[ASB]

Not exactly, it was Westpac Bank, but Woolies (and BP service stations) were our first partners in the pilot. This was about 1986/7... No integration yet, the checkout chicks would manually enter the transaction into the POS machine directly from their abacus.
Cheers
Ron

Small world. When that was dfully integrated in the eraly 90s I did most of the pos code.

[darmstadt]

Raytheon still use an IBM 360 over in the US to run their payroll. That's the last time I saw one...

Not anymore, they're one of my customers and although they still run this application its not on the 360 anymore but a variation of.

[meridian]

Small world. When that was dfully integrated in the eraly 90s I did most of the pos code.

Is the acronym for "point of sale" or "piece of sh*t"?

[Fleetwood]

Pornography

[ASB]

Is the acronym for "point of sale" or "piece of sh*t"?

I guess I asked for that.
Some of the devices I had to deal with definitely fell into the latter category though