John Mertic is director of program management for the Linux Foundation’s Open Mainframe Project (www.openmainframeproject.org), an effort to bring open source knowledge, and of course Linux, to mainframe computing.
Hip youngsters today may not be aware that every bank transaction and every flight booking all end up being processed on mainframe machines. But it is fact. Also, despite processing all this valuable data and often having hundreds of CPUs and thousands of gigabytes of memory, no one (that we know of) has ever hacked a mainframe. Thanks to Zowe, one of the Open Mainframe Project’s key efforts, a green-screen 3270 terminal is no longer the only way to access mainframe data. You can use SSH, cloudy REST APIs or even a JavaScript-powered desktop. And you don’t need to know COBOL either, but it probably helps. There’s a lot of momentum towards training the new generation of mainframers, and the Open Mainframe Project is pivotal to that.