alt Hacker NewsI work with a lot of COBOL dinosaurs in the bank, I often like to watch them work on their 16-colors IBM z/OS host terminals, it's quite mesmerizing. Sometimes they show me some interesting code that was written before I was alive (I'm 36), or tell me stories about big mainframe incidents in the '80s, where they would get called in the middle of the night and flown to a different country to fix a bug because there was no remote desktop back then.
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I work with developers who code on OS 2200 and VAX VMS (running on Charon emulation).
Fun fact: the first SMP UNIX implementation ran on top of EXEC 8, the kernel of OS 2200.
"Any configuration supplied by Sperry, including multiprocessor ones, can run the UNIX system."
https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/retro...
Edit: https://web.archive.org/web/20150611114648/https://www.bell-...
> I often like to watch them work on their 16-colors IBM z/OS host terminals, it's quite mesmerizing
They really are. I had a parttime coworker who moonlighted some mainframe job and he often had another laptop on his desk connected to a z/OS terminal. He would show me some of the jobs and code occasionally too, really fascinating stuff, and he was quite good at it and could navigate quickly.
I used to work with the most amazing blind COBOL programmer on CICS code. His speed in finding and fixing code with a screen reader, was mind blowing.
I’ve built systems for iSeries and none of the modern fancy GUI IDEs come close to the speed of those IBM 5250 terminals. You can still see such terminals in action in POCO baumarkt in Berlin.
One of the modules I saw in action was written before the moon landing, written by a lady programmer.
<16-colors IBM z/OS host terminal
This hasn't been virtualized?
Damn mainframe people flaunting their 16 colors like they're a peacock or something. Shit. We only had one color (and one absence of a color) and that was good enough.