Blogs: Mainframes

Flashback to the late 1970s, when this IT pilot fish's team has just gone live with a custom hospital management system, complete with order entry for the nurse stations. But user acceptance is mixed.

Tech quits his job in this IT department, so someone has to pick up his support duties, and this pilot fish draws the assignment. An uneventful year and a half later, he gets his second call -- and it's a doozy.

Pilot fish is working for a company whose offices are located in a wooded, mostly residential area that's beautiful but has its downsides -- including regular power outages.

At this big manufacturing plant, an employee has a problem with a mainframe-terminal keyboard that sticks -- and unfortunately, the vendor has a fix for him.

A news report blames the Long Island Power Authority's slow response to restoring electricity on a 25-year-old mainframe. But are a mainframe and Cobol really the probelm?

Help desk pilot fish gets a call from a user who's trying to log onto a company mainframe via the network, but he just can't get it to work. That means it's troubleshooting time -- starting with what the user sees on his screen.

Flashback to the days of green-screen monitors, when this IT vendor support tech gets a call from a metal fabrication plant -- and according to the caller, a computer is leaking oil.

It's 1981, and this company has just replaced its aging mainframe with a new mainframe-compatible midrange computer. But programmers on the new system are about to be come very familiar with a certain sound.

IBM (NASDAQ:IBM) proudly announces its latest big, blue baby, the zEnterprise EC12 mainframe. Yes, Virginia, it's still totally relevant in today's great green, virtualized, consumerized, cloud-computing paradise -- or so IBM says: You decide! In IT Blogwatch, bloggers help us decide.

The mainframe will soon be just another part of IBM's cloud-based disaster recovery service offering, allowing the enterprise to effectively create a backup data center in the cloud, says IBM distinguished engineer and CTO Richard Cocchiara.