Mainframe a Classic 'Survivor Technology'
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Just weeks after a site cropped up serving the sole purpose of waxing nostalgic about extinct technology skills, The New York Times considers why old technologies are "still kicking." Its prime example is the mainframe, whose demise has been predicted by countless analysts and editors and yet remains to this day a viable career path. Solidifying this, just last month IBM released the latest version of its mainframe. These "survivor technologies" come in more formats than Big Iron. "Television, for example, was supposed to kill radio, and movies, for that matter. Cars, trucks and planes spelled the death of railways. A current death-knell forecast is that the Web will kill print media," writes Steve Lohr for The New York Times. Survivor technologies seem to share a few traits: an enduring advantage of the old technology that is not supplanted by the new and businesses that invest to retool the technology and keep it relevant. "Technologies want to survive, and they reinvent themselves to go on," Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster in Silicon Valley, told The Times. |
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Comments (1)
Regarding technologies that are "supposed" to go extinct and specifically mainframes, even 15 years ago, I would always say that mainframes are here to stay. The reason? Because the more powerful the PC and mid-range servers get, the more powerful the mainframes get. Mainframes are solid and well known. I'm not a mainframe tehnologist, but I have clients that have tried to get rid of them only to find out that it would cost more to replace and it would not do all the things that the current big iron system does.
From a career standpoint, it makes for great job security in the sense that you are in demand if you know or learn these so-called legacy technologies. I still get called to work with OS/2 servers, REXX programming tasks, and NetWare (whose death knell has been tolled many times in the last 10 years). I can command a high fee because more and more people are ignoring or losing their skillsets in these and other areas so it's a supply and demand situation. But you can't ignore current technology, you have to not only be able to work with the old stuff but also the new stuff. And, getting the old stuff to work with the new stuff and migrating off the old stuff is also very much in demand.
I know of one mainframe systems guy (you know, the guy or gal that sits in front of a green screen and does 3270 assembler coding all day) and he gets $150 per hour as a contractor. So much for not being able to make a living doing mainframes, right?
Posted by Mark Dean - VM Computing | March 28, 2008 11:49 PM