IT Management: Linux Jockeys, Meet Mainframe Mavens

“One can hardly imagine two more different groups of people in
the world of computing.

“In the glass house, where the mainframe reigns in
air-conditioned splendor, mainframe jockeys running Cobol batch
jobs keep the core business of banks, airlines and other large
enterprises humming, as they have for decades.

“Meanwhile, down the hall, Unix hackers are coding distributed
applications in Java, Perl and XML on a Linux server sitting under
their desk. To them, the proprietary mainframe applications and
their archaic, green-screen user interfaces seem like something
left over from the days of black-and-white television.

“For years, these two groups had little reason to talk with each
other. But now, they are being brought together by the unlikely
combination of mainframe hardware, IBM’s VM operating system, and
the open source Linux operating system…”

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