The last two years, I have participated in a student competition sponsored by IBM that has been designed to keep interest in Mainframe operations in the younger generations.
Mainframe systems have been around for decades, but over the last 10 years or so, they have fallen out of the public eye, and interest in learning how these systems work has waned. Consequently, the population of Mainframe experts is aging quickly, and some companies are ending up in crisis as these people retire with nobody to take their place.
IBM began this contest with the idea of rekindling interest in Mainframes within student populations.
The competition consists of three parts:
- General How-To and Getting Around – A simple set of tasks that are designed to give even the absolute beginner an idea of how the system is laid out, how to work with data, and basic operations.
- Practical Experience – Part 2 gets more involved and gives the student competitor a chance to see what kind of operations real Mainframe admins perform on a daily basis. This also includes some debugging and job control operations, and actually gets fairly in-depth in the operations of the system.
- Real-World Challenges – This is a much longer part that pits the student against problems and challenges that have been seen in the real world. There are job control, debugging, coding, administration, and many other challenges.
Last year, I managed to make it through Part 2, but didn’t get a chance to start working in Part 3. This year, I completed Part 2 on the first day of competition, and have started working on Part 3. I plan to work as much as I can on Part 3 until the deadline of December 29.
So, what does all of this have to do with blogging? Well, as part of attempting to get the word out among the younger generations, IBM has offered to work with bloggers and other social media consumers. By feeding us information and soliciting us to share our input and opinions, we can help IBM show the world that Mainframes are still a big thing and worth learning.
Once in a while, you will see a post here with information about the Mainframe world from IBM. I do this because I think it’s a worthy endeavor. Mainframe systems are still the supreme workhorse of the processing world. (These are my own opinions and experience, BTW) While many of the systems with which we interact with Mainframes feel antiquated and counter-intuitive in our point-and-click computing world, they are purpose-built and work perfectly for the system. Getting over the hump of transitioning from a graphical interface to a textual one is one of the biggest challenges for people attempting to get into Mainframe systems anew.
But I think it’s worth it.