Telling the modern mainframe story

From: S Comstock (scomstock_at_aol.com)
Date: 02/26/04 

Date: 26 Feb 2004 14:48:44 GMT

'Lo,

Last month my wife and I were at a dinner at a friend's house. We got to
talking about work and the hostess mentioned she was a COBOL programmer at a
local company. I asked what version of COBOL she was using. "I don't know,
COBOL 370 or something like that."

I pursued her knowledge a little bit and was shocked to find she had no idea
about the changes in COBOL, mainframes, the Internet, and so on, for the last,
say, 10 years!

For someone who strives constantly to be current, this blew me away. But I got
to thinking about it and realized she was probably more typical than I am. More
typical than the people who subscribe to this list.

It drives me nuts realizing how little both management and technical people
know about what's going on in their field. IBM's not telling the story very
well, that's for sure. Mainframes are still perceived as obsolete clunkers by
the vast majority of people - even in the industry.

So I've started a little page on my web site of what I call VSPs - Very Short
Presentations. I'm trying to communicate information about modern IBM mainframe
systems in short sound-bite type presentations: PDF's of 5 to 8 pages, lots of
bullets. These can be downloaded free of charge from
http://www.trainersfriend.com/VSP_site.htm

Feel free to point management or technical people to them. Although the last
page in each VSP is our contact ***, you can download a presentation and if
you have the full Acrobat product you can just remove the last page. The point
is to tell the story.

There may be some errors in this batch, since I just whipped up half a dozen in
a day. If you find errors I am happy to correct them. If you have suggestions
for other topics, let me know. I'll be adding new ones periodically. Let me
know if this way of telling the modern mainframe story is of any benefit to
your shop.

Kind regards,

-Steve Comstock
800-993-9716
303-393-8716
www.trainersfriend.com
email: steve@trainersfriend.com
256-B S. Monaco Parkway
Denver, CO 80224
USA