I’m a mainframe guy. Cut my teeth writing COBOL, PL/I and FORTRAN on the IBM System/370. CICS is my friend. Was playing with virtual machines long, long before there was anything called “DOS” or Windows” or Linux.” My office closet is filled with punch cards and old nine-track tapes, all probably unreadable today. One of the happiest days of my professional life was trading in an old TeleVideo 925 monochrome terminal for a brand-new 3279 color display.
If you listen to just about any marketer in the software development or
IT industry, mainframes are always described as legacy systems – with the implication that only a total loser would continue to use such an outdated piece of junk.
By casually repeating terms like “legacy system,” or buying into the phrase “legacy modernization” for projects that integrate mainframes with other platforms like Java and .NET, everyone perpetuates the marketing myth that mainframes are bad. That they’re relics whose time has come and gone. That the goal of any IT professional should be to replace every mainframe with something else – anything else.
I say, “Bah, humbug. Nonsense. Fiddlesticks. Balderdash.”