Prev: Computer Science Education: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow?
Next: Quicksort recursiv
From: Clark Morris on 9 Jan 2008 21:13
On Sun, 6 Jan 2008 12:18:49 +1300, "Pete Dashwood"
<dashwood(a)removethis.enternet.co.nz> wrote:

>
>
>"Scott" <NoSpam(a)Spamblocker.org> wrote in message
>news:NoednW8wwYa-heLaRVn_vwA(a)giganews.com...
>> THE biggest problem with the mainframe is that IBM never embraced a GUI
>> screen. That's what it's all about. Why is everyone migrating from
>> mainframe to servers? In almost every place I've worked or looked at, it
>> is always the same thing. It's not about COBOL. It's not about
>> performance. It's not about security. It's not about reliability. It's not
>> about efficiency. In many cases it's not even about cost. It's all about
>> pretty colors, fancy fonts, drop down boxes, scroll bars, point-click and
>> giggle. Everyone wants that "rich GUI experience" in their application and
>> you can't do that on the mainframe. People don't want 3270 screens and
>> haven't for 15 years. If IBM had embraced GUI screen application
>> development on the mainframe, we'd still have strong mainframes today.
>>
>
>If the manframe COBOL community had embraced OO, you might have HAD GUI on
>the mainframe... (OO empowers a GUI approach)
>
>It is all supposition and postulation.
>
>We'll never know.
>
>I read your paragraph above with some sympathy. I think you're right that
>people wanted GUI (once they saw their kids using it on their Amigas and
>Sinclairs at home :-))
>
>(I remember talking to the CEO of a major UK utility and asking why they
>were sending out letters to customers without signatures and on green
>lineflo... A multi-million dollar system, that couldn't do what a PC or Mac
>that cost less than a thousandth of the price could do all day long standing
>on its head, as a fundamental principle.)

Don't blame the mainframe, blame the IT management. We had a Xerox
laser printer in my shop in the 1980's. It had a megabyte of memory
and I think a 100 megabyte disk. It printed on both sides of the
paper and if we had gotten fancy, I think we had our choice of fonts.
I suspect we could have printed signatures if needed.
>
>Given that people (Users) actually WANTED a GUI (or at least, something more
>intuitive than a command line...) interface, don't you think it is incumbent
>on us as IT professionals to try and address that need?

Most users in my shop were going into CICS which was constrained by
being on a text terminal but they certainly were not dealing with a
command line. The help system provided was non-existent but that was
more because management didn't see the need to take advantage of the
help capabilities provided by CICS. The programmers were using ISPF
and definitely not the command line interface since management didn't
want them to get outside of ISPF capabilities. No one was dealing
with a command line interface.
>
>Mainframes CAN do GUI, they just need a different approach from the
>imperative COBOL one. And the IT community was not about to accept that.
>(Judging from this forum, they still aren't...:-))

The infrastructure wasn't there until IBM got serious about Java and
Websphere. If the main interactive application was CICS, OO wasn't
going to help that much until the appropriate infrastructure was
available. I understand that there are C/C++ classes for dealing with
CICS. If they are in source to be included at compile that won't help
COBOL but if they are in a form to be either dynamically invoked or
linked in at link time, theoretically they could be made available to
COBOL programs if IBM would get off its COBOL will only talk to JAVA
jag.
>
>Pete.
 | 
Pages: 1
Prev: Computer Science Education: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow?
Next: Quicksort recursiv