“On a brisk and sunny day at Marist College, in Poughkeepsie,
N.Y., the school’s data processing facility overflows with life.
… Harry Williams, the school’s director of technology and
systems, oversees this scene with a knowing smile. Last year, when
most of Marist’s applications were written in out-of-fashion
languages such as COBOL and FORTRAN, Williams couldn’t pay students
to come in and work on them. Today, however, with the mainframe
running the Linux operating system, he said computer science
students are so interested that some have volunteered their
time.”
“This phenomenon is no coincidence; in an age when many young
technophiles are turned off by anything older than client/server
architecture, Marist’s move to Linux is part of a concerted
effort by a number of universities, at the urging of IBM, to make
mainframe skills more attractive. Rather than trying to teach
students how to use the mainframe with old languages they perceive
as boring, officials at these schools have opted to teach newer
mainframe skills through technologies that are more fun and promise
more value on future job markets.”
“Languages such as Java, C++, and SQL are all in this new
mix, but at the core is Linux. And with recent statistics from
International Data Corp. showing this operating system growing
faster than any other, Williams said it should be… “There’s this
mental image among a lot of them as the mainframe being this old
dinosaur that can’t do anything,” Williams said of his students.
“With Linux, we hope to change all of that for good.”