Mainframe, MVS and zOS Discussion

My name is John Concannon and I am now based in Switzerland. I grew up in north west London but have been living abroad for around 40 years.

Yes, I belong to the dinosaurs.

I spent about 15 years in systems programming and around 25 years in applications programming. At the end of 2012 I got laid off (along with 2'000 others) by a major bank in Zurich. I then found out that age matters and I couldn't get a job anywhere.
I decided to carry on working on a product which I have been developing off and on for 10 years. I hope that if I am to old, then, at least, the product is young.
The product has taken me into some interesting areas, e.g. dynamic storage using LE services, multithreading (Thread engine in C) for cobol/PL/1, generating/rendering XML in Cobol (without having to use Schemas) etc.

I build the front end side using visual studio (C#) and use OpenCobol for the heavy lifting (Copybook analysis, program generation etc.).

I am often hitting areas where there is (it seems) pioneer work to be done and decided that I would be good to talk to others to help find my way through and, on the other side, share my experiences (and solutions) to anyone who might be interested.

John (Owl)

My email address is in my signature, cannot send you an interesting PM, just in case you want access to a z/OS system.

Robert