Tuesday, April 1, 2014

TDV131 Signing Off

It started as a 6 month project to "lift and drop" our entire credit & debit card processing system from the IBM mainframe to a UNIX server. That was summer of 2011.

Well, here we are, April 1st of 2014, only 2 years and 8 months behind schedule (coincidentally, the exact amount of time it takes to rewrite half our stuff and retest everything). Nevertheless, as of today, the migration is complete. We are totally on the server. (when it's up, which is... most of the time)

And that means we are completely off the mainframe. In fact, as of the time of this post, we no longer even have a mainframe. The plug has been pulled and our IDs are inactive. After 20 years and 2 months, TDV131 is no more.

Instead, I'm now jsmith.

Wow, look at that - amazing, so 21st century! Really makes it all worthwhile.

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8 comments:

  1. JulietApril 1, 2014 at 7:15 AM

    That's funny.
    We're doing something like that at my work too. It's called the ECMS, (editorial content management system), a way to manage journal ingestion, processing, and platforming, except that they've been promising it to us since before I started working at the company, 13 years ago...

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  2. JennyApril 1, 2014 at 8:21 AM

    Hmmm, I think I like the pretty blue and green font from the mainframe better...

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  3. JeffApril 1, 2014 at 8:26 AM

    pfft. Clearly you are missing the great advance we've made in getting away from the mainframe's "green screen" interface. That was one of the big reasons we did this project - to modernize and get away from the "green screen". Can't you see how much better off we are now?

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  4. ErikaApril 1, 2014 at 11:11 AM

    wow. I guess you win the 'who gets their project done first' award. We're 4.5 years in and still going. Of course, we're also deploying 7 applications worldwide... and our interface is 'just' a SMIDGEN more modern. ;)

    The real question is... did you guys learn from your experience and will you plan out your next project better? ;)

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  5. JeffApril 1, 2014 at 11:19 AM

    Waddya mean "more modern" ? We're not green screen anymore. We're using a black & white menu now, and sometimes even a UNIX command line. We were told it's the latest thing!

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  6. SueApril 2, 2014 at 7:48 PM

    The mainframe went away on April Fools Day. How appropriate.

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  7. JeffApril 2, 2014 at 8:00 PM

    Sue, I had the same thought, but on the flip side.

    "We completed the migration to the server on April Fool's Day. How appropriate."

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  8. PaApril 4, 2014 at 8:49 PM

    Are you being sarcastic??
    (wink wink)

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