My name is Gary Puchkoff and I am a mainframeaholic.  Yes, I am addicted to information about large systems computing.  Some people would also call this information technology – IT.  I have been working in this part of the computing world for over 35 years. Before you draw too many false conclusions… I have programmed and researched in many areas of software and hardware.  I wrote assembler code on z80 processors, VAX processors, S/370 processors… I have written code in COBOL, PL/I, Pascal, LISP, Prolog, SmallTalk, SNOBOL, APL, Forth, Java, Basic, Javascript, REXX, CLIST… and JCL.  I have a particular fondness for JCL as you will see.

I was a developer of z/OS, and tools to build z/OS.  I was a principal developer of WebSphere Application Server, I co-invented the zAAP (a Java price performance tool).   I am the principal designer of z/OSMF bringing a browser based management user interface to z/OS.  Most recently I was a heavy contributor to z/OS Container Extensions (zCX) a facility that allows Linux on z software run in a z/OS address space.

I will point out that I am not much of a believer in Blogs… so if you like this blog I guess that would be nice… but if you don’t like this blog… then you are probably more like me.  My view is that most blogs are written by people who are not experts in what they are talking about and their opinion is probably not worth much.  I don’t do much blog reading and I find it a little hard to believe that people would read my blog.  But people around me like my marketing lead tell me it would be ‘great if you wrote a blog’.  So we are going to try this out.

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton