“They lost it. We’ll get it back.”

T-Rexxers was once applied in a disparaging way to those who managed mainframes, implying that Big Iron was going extinct like the dinosaurs and ceding the turf to open systems. For a few years, the campaign to create an “us versus them” dynamic in the business computing world was hugely successful, suggested by slowing sales of mainframe hardware and software through the mid-2000s and the massive adoption of distributed wares. Many mainframe developers shuttered their operations. Kids stopped enrolling in the university programs that would provide the basic skills they required to pursue a mainframe career. The curtain was coming down on the mainframe show.

Then, something remarkable happened.

The distributed systems vendors started “borrowing” concepts from mainframe technology: parallelism, systems resource management, virtualization, multiprocessing—just to name a few. Only, the mainframe had a 30 year advantage in development and already offered elegant and stable solutions to the very problems that the open systems developers were endeavoring to solve. Somewhere along the way, perhaps with the onset of an economic slowdown, business management had an epiphany. The business value case for distributed computing began to be reassessed.

Left with only remnants of the old world, mainframers are tasked with creating new building blocks and reprogramming the world as it should be. Being leaders, we embrace the developments of the distributed world and appropriate integration.

This is the hub. You are the gatekeepers. And with great power comes great responsibilities. Connections must be made. Knowledge shared. Progress inspired. T-REXXERS is your source for information, inquiry and debate. This is not just a website. It’s an interactive community that thrives on the contributions of mainframers, both new and experienced, across the globe. As a member of the trexxers.com community, you now have a location where questions can be asked, answers can be gotten, knowledge can be shared, grievances can be aired, and kudos can be given. Your participation will help to define how valuable T-Rexxers.com will become in your professional life and day to day work. And we always want you to email us anything else you might like to share.

Ultimately, it is up to you to decide whether the T-Rexxer will become once again the dominant creature in the business computing world.

CA, Inc. is proud to have created this forum for mainframers, and we’re happy to put it in your hands.