Moderator's Interview Series: nicc.

[Anuj Dhawan]

Moderator's Interview : nicc

zMainframes: Do you use an avatar name here or you use your real name as avatar name?

ANSWER

Real name - nickname + intial letter of family name

zMainframes: How long you have been associated with computers, in general?

ANSWER

Since 1973

zMainframes: And since when you've been working with mainframes?

ANSWER

Since 1973

zMainframes: Would you like to share your IT experience with us?

ANSWER

Worked with IBM internally in UK, Australia, Ireland and Austria
Worked with Electricity company in Australia
Worked with banks in Australia and Ireland
Worked for post office in Ireland - 1 day of trouble shooting whilst working for IBM Ireland
Worked with Eurocontrol (air traffic control co-ordination) in Belgium
Worked with airline in Ireland

zMainframes: Have you worked on IBM mainframes mostly or you have worked with other vendors too?

ANSWER

Almost exclusively IBM or IBM-compatible

zMainframes: If yes, could you please name them and do you see a difference among hardware per se?

ANSWER

Electricity company had an Amdhal. I don't care about differences except when I have to code differently (as was the case when trouble-shooting at the post office who were migrating PL/1 programs from a Prime to AS400

zMainframes: What difference do you see, from S360 days to zOS 2.x days - ease of use, better interface,
more power to end user or something more? Describe it in your own words.

ANSWER

Reliability - I when I started we had 2 360/65s 1mb and .75mb except on Monday mornings when they were powered up after the weekend when each lost a storage frame so they became .7mb and .5mb respectively.

zMainframes: In an age of social-media, cloud, DevOps and you name it technology where do you see mainframe
in the computer industry?

ANSWER

Don't care - I am retired.

zMainframes: Why do you help on Forums? And what is the message you'd like to give to the new Forum users -
rationally, irrespective of their experience in the field?

ANSWER

I have experience and I know stuff that I can share.

1 - Your first port of call is F1 then the manual then experimentation then your team members then your support groups then a forum. Lastly - search engine (except to help you find the manual and forum).
2 - Read the forum rules before selecting a forum to use.

zMainframes: What is your take on statements like "millennials are not attracted towards mainframe?" Are we not advertising this platform good enough or there is more to it, your thoughts please.

ANSWER

Thought 1 - Who makes up these stupid words?
Thought 2 - On what basis do they make these remarks?

We never needed to advertise because computers WERE mainframes and no-one knew about them. Now there are PCs everywhere and evry one knows about PCs (but not COMPUTERS).

Modification Log: Posted the initial version, 06 Dec, 2017

[Mainframe Bear]

Electricity company had an Amdhal. I don't care about differences except when I have to code differently (as was the case when trouble-shooting at the post office who were migrating PL/1 programs from a Prime to AS400

Why a post office would need a mainframes? Is not it that mostly Banking system are using the mainframes? But post office would make use of the mainframes, I never thought of that.

[nicc]

When you employ 100,000 people are you going to run your payroll on a PC? Any large organisation is going to run organisation-wide applications on a largecomputer, but not necessarily a mainframe.

[Rima Bali]

We never needed to advertise because computers WERE mainframes and no-one knew about them. Now there are PCs everywhere and evry one knows about PCs (but not COMPUTERS).

So you want to say there is a difference between PCs and COMPUTERS? What is the difference?