Kirkman Enterprises

 The 2010 season of the "Master the Mainframe" contest run by IBM started this week for students in North America.  It was announced on their Facebook page that there are already 3,118 people registered for the contest the most number of registrants in its six year history.  If you find yourself asking why it's so popular and think that mainframes are in declining use, this blog entry may be of interest to you.  I am competing in the contest and have already been officially announced as one of the many winners of the first part of the contest.  This is my fourth go round with the competition and have been fortunate and skilled enough to have placed in the overall top 5 twice before.  It has opened up many opportunities for me to visit places around the US, speak to groups of people, and have fun "playing" on a mainframe.  But why is it important again?  Here's why.....

A large part of the people currently working on mainframes have been doing so for many years.  Many of these people are at or close to retirement age.  However, there is not a large number of younger people skilled with mainframes to take their places.  Mainframes still play a very important role in today's society.  I gave a presentation to the student ACM group at West Texas A&M a couple years ago that I will post on my portfolio page just after this.  While it's two years old, I think much of the information is still the same today.  Most of the world's banks use mainframes to run financial transactions through and keep track of everyone's bank balances, most of the world's insurance companies use mainframes, many of the Fortune 500 companies use mainframes.  

So what is involved with this contest?  It has three parts of growing difficulty.  It starts off by introducing you to the mainframe and how to log into the classic TSO interface.  You learn how to edit file, run programs, and fix software defects.  Throughout the course of the entire contest you get exposed to a variety of programming languages from the, today, well known Java and C/C++ to, possibly the antique, COBOL and PL/I to the, mainframe specialty, JCL.  By the end of the third part, the competitor really learns a lot of skills in programming for a mainframe.  

I haven't gotten to the end of this year's part three.  In the past, tasks have included implementing changes to a CICS user interface to interact with a DB2 database on the mainframe to produce reports and creating algorithms to solve a problem using as little CPU time as possible.  I am looking forward to finishing the third part of this year's competition and attempting to win my third trip to IBM's mainframe research center in Poughkeepsie, New York.

If you are a student who may be interested in participating in the contest head over to the contest site at: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/university/students/contests/mainframe/index.html