May 19, 2009

Today I’m introducing our new bi-weekly comic strip, “The Zone”.
Our hope is to amuse you with a comic look into the life of the IT staff at fictional company, Trans-Neighborhood Systems.
In addition to whatever ideas pop into Colin’s [our cartoonist] head, we thought this would be a great opportunity to ask you, our faithful readers, to tell us your great stories and anecdotes from the workplace. If you would like to submit a cartoon idea, please email colin[at]mainframezone.com with your story or submit a comment to this post. If your anecdote is chosen as inspiration for “The Zone”, we will happily send you a free T-Shirt of your choice.
As always, your feedback is welcome and encouraged, so please drop us a line to tell us what we’re doing right, what we could do better or just to say “hi”.
Thanks, and I hope you enjoy the cartoon (click for full size).
Mainframe Trivia Contest #11May 12, 2009
The Mainframe Trivia Contest #10 is now over. SHARE, GUIDE, and WAVV are/or were all mainframe user groups. COMMON is a midrange systems user group.
The winners of a mainframe T-shirt for correctly answering the Mainframe Trivia Contest #10 question are:
· Robert Payne: Tarrant Appraisal District, Fort Worth, Texas
· Mike Watkins: Pentagon Federal Credit Union, Chantilly, Virginia
· John Greer: Syncpoint Software, Wayne, New Jersey
Mainframe Trivia Contest #11
Possibly the best book ever written about software development was titled, “The Mythical Man- Month”. It was written by a gentleman who was very important to the development of the IBM mainframe. Who was the author?
· Bob Evans
· Gene Amdahl
· Vin Learson
· Fred Brooks
· Al Williams
(I will randomly select three winners of this Mainframe Trivia Contest #11 who will receive the T-shirt pictured below. To participate, either answer via a Comment to this post - it will not be made public for others to see - or send me an Email to bob@mainframezone.com with Mainframe Trivia Contest #11 in the Subject line — Don’t forget to state your T-shirt size.)






