I started in IBM in January of 1982 as a co-op, this is like an intern. IBM was not my first choice… I was a biology major at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy NY. RPI was a technical college like MIT but located in New York and less well known to the general public. Technical people recognized RPI as a top notch engineering school. I went there because their computer center was in a former church… really.

I was doing Biology because my Dad was a dentist, and his father was a dentist… and it seemed like a good profession to be in… and keep the family legacy. Any chance I got though… I would be found writing code. Back then you got some time on a system (a time sharing system) for each class you took that required it. But it was hard to get more time… unless you bartered with people. “I’ll write your project for you if you give me your computer time”. I was one of those people that actually read the manual from front to back and remembered most of it. I could do things on MTS (Michigan Terminal System) that others had no idea you could do.

Being a Biology major it turned out I didn’t need quite as many credits as some other majors. I decided to apply for a semester internship using the RPI co-op office. I found the coolest job doing computer simulation of cell chemistry that was intended to lead up to simulating a cell. This was at Lawrence Livermore Lab in California. I did a phone interview, was accepted and I was getting ready to pack. I got a call that the budget was cut and they had to rescind the offer. Now I was kind of stuck, I hadn’t picked any classes for the spring semester… The co-op office jumped in and said that IBM might have something interesting. So I did a call with a group in East Fishkill and accepted the job.

Before I even got the next details, they handed me to another group in Poughkeepsie. They claimed to have an even better internship. Another friend of mine Rich was also doing a co-op and I agreed to share an apartment in Poughkeepsie with him. My recollection was I moved in on Sunday January 3rd and that evening we had an ice storm and I couldn’t get my car out on that first Monday… it may have been that co-ops didn’t start until tuesday.

After filling out paperwork, I got to my building, a carriage house about 3 miles from the Poughkeepsie main site. My boss was Charlie Daniele and the area was site safety and chemical control. Charlie was the product safety manager and the manager of the Industrial Hygiene department. I was assigned to industrial hygiene. I got a pager, and would put sound and radiation dosimeters on people, put air samplers out for asbestos and other things. If there was a chemical spill I was supposed to go there and determine if the area needed to be evacuated. After 2 weeks this didn’t excite me.

I thought about going back to RPI… but Charlie asked me what I might want to do. He had 3-4 people working on computerizing various tasks in the area. I said I would do that. Well they said we can have you help Lorraine do data input… and if you do that… we will see if you can help write some code… CODE… this excited me. They dropped a listing (green stripe paper) about 8 inches high with 60 or so lines per page… and each entry had to be put into a new system.

So starting with page one I typed in each line of information… and it took a long time… between Lorraine and I it might take 3 months. Not so much fun. One of the programmers, Barry, pointed out that I could update more than one row at a time… which I started doing. I estimated we might be able to finish in a month.

Then a fateful event happened… I accidentally omitted the equivalent of the ‘when’ clause and updated every entry in the database to ‘Smooth Black Paint Spec 25’ or something like that… ‘Oh crap’… this was a huge problem… since the database was used by others. I went to Frank, the team leader and he said there was no backup. At this point I had a choice… go back to RPI… or stay and fix this problem…

I decided to stay and fix it. As it turns out the data management team had a recent backup and we didn’t have to recover too much. I worked on entering data. In no time we had it done.

They then started to try and teach me MIS360… an IBM file management product. Most of the programmers in IBM in the IT area we retrained machinists and other things… I took the books home and read them. I built my first application in about a week (others might have take 3-4 months). I built 3 more of those applications during my co-op. I also learned about 3270 terminals, printers and controllers and ordered and installed 40 or so across 4 buildings. I learned APL and built a report tool on chemical authorization.

Needless to say I redeemed myself, and was offered a permanent job on my exit interview.

So there are a couple lessons, such as when one door closes another opens. (LLNL to IBM)… Sometimes when something seems like a bad situation there is a silver lining (data entry to programming)… and maybe the most important is you only have your personal integrity (sticking around to repair the mess I created).

Next I will talk about how I ended up in MVS development.

I have retired from IBM.

I worked for IBM for 41 years. It was a great career that included many interesting projects that resulted in 3 corporate awards, travel, etc.

Maybe I will write some blog entries about some of the IBM projects I worked on… we’ll see.

z/OS 3.1 has become generally available. This is the first new z/OS version in 10 years. The focus of version 3 is going to be around AI. Initially a new AI framework and usage for improving WLM powered initiators. You will use a z/OSMF application to train the AI code on your batch usage, then it will use that information to predict the initiator usage and needs. The result is a model that should be more aligned with your usage making z/OS more responsive and requiring less manual operation.

z/OS 3.1 also of course has all the incremental improvements you’ve come to look for in a new z/OS release from improvements in JES2, SDSF, RACF, RMF etc.

A couple of my favorites are the module fetch monitor in SDSF which tracks loads and helps you to identify modules that might be better placed in LLA. Another is the RMF Grafana user interface which brings a high function graphical user interface to RMF.

I also like the JES2 policy support which starts to provide default policy that will help you avoid out of space situations on Spool.