This week brings a special event honoring the IBM Z line of mainframes, writes long-time Slashdot reader theodp: As part of this week’s IBM Z Day event, looking-for-young-blood IBM is teaming up with tech-backed K-12 CS nonprofits Code.org and CSforALL and calling on students 14-and-up to Master The Mainframe during the 24-hour code-a-thon to open doors to new opportunities with…
Tag: mainframe
SUSE Releases Major Linux Update
SUSE has released the next versions of its flagship operating system, SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 15 Service Pack 2 and its latest infrastructure management program, SUSE Manager 4.1. ZDNet reports: SLE 15 SP2 is available on the x86-64, Arm, IBM POWER, IBM Z, and LinuxONE hardware architectures. This new Linux server edition is based on the Linux 5.3 kernel. This new…
A Spaceflight Engineer Recovers the Lost Software For Apollo 10’s Lunar Module
Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Vintage computing enthusiasts have recreated NASA’s legendary “Apollo Guidance Computer,” the 1960s-era assembly-language onboard guidance and navigation computer for the Apollo missions to the moon. Unfortunately, the software had been lost for the Apollo 10 mission (a manned “dress rehearsal” mission which flew to the moon eight weeks before Neil Armstrong’s famous moonwalk mission). But spaceflight…
Cobol Programmers Heed the Call to Support America’s Overloaded Unemployment Systems
Earlier this week Slashdot reader puddingebola shared a CNN story headlined “Wanted urgently: People who know a half century-old computer language so states can process unemployment claims…” But now IEEE Spectrum reports that “Cobol programmers in the United States are heeding the call to work on antiquated state unemployment benefits computer systems⦔ The new claims brought the three-week total to more…
IBM Rallies COBOL Engineers To Save Overloaded Unemployment Systems
As millions file for unemployment benefits in the United States every week, states’ aging computer systems simply cannot keep up. States like New Jersey and Connecticut have said they are desperate for programmers who are still familiar with COBOL, a programming language that debuted in 1960 and is still used in critical computer systems like unemployment databases and banks. But there…
Gopher’s Rise and Fall Shows How Much We Lost When Monopolists Stole the Net
Science-fiction writer, journalist and longtime Slashdot reader, Cory Doctorow, a.k.a. mouthbeef, writes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) just published the latest installment in my case histories of “adversarial interoperability” — once the main force that kept tech competitive. Today, I tell the story of Gopher, the web’s immediate predecessor, which burrowed under the mainframe systems’ guardians and created a menu-driven interface…
Linux is Ready for the End of Time
January 19, 2038 is for Linux what Y2K was for mainframe and PC computers in 2000, reports ZDNet. It’s the day that the value for time “runs out of numbers” and, in the case of 32-bit Unix-based operating systems like Linux and older versions of macOS, “starts counting time with negative numbers…” “But the fixes are underway to make sure all…
Move Over, Silicon Valley: St. Louis, Atlanta, Small Cities Gaining Tech Jobs
Slashdot reader SpaceForceCommander shared Dice’s new annual report on America’s tech industry salaries based on a survey of over 12,800 “technologists”: Columbus and St. Louis enjoyed double-digit year-over-year growth in salaries (14.2 percent and 13.6 percent, respectively), and other cities such as Denver [7 percent] and Atlanta [10 percent] also experienced an ideal mix of growth and high salaries. These up-and-comers…
Clayton Christensen, Father of ‘Disruptive Innovation,’ Dies At 67
Clayton Christensen, the business scholar who coined the term “disruptive innovation,” died of cancer treatment complications on Thursday at age 67. The Verge reports: You may not immediately recognize his name, but the tech industry — and every resulting industry — is built on the framework of technology disruption and innovation that Christensen devised. The crux of Christensen’s theory is that…
Geeks Successfully Transport a 50-Year-Old IBM Mainframe to Former UK Top Secret Mi6 Base
In April Slashdot reader Adam Bradley won an eBay auction for an IBM 360 mainframe computer. Then he began blogging “the saga that unfurled” in transporting it from an abandoned building in Germany to the U.K. (where Adam volunteers at The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley, England.) “The traffic from Slashdot on our original posts was incredible,” he writes today….