sb-alien

After the migration, when they were "decomissioning" the mainframe itself, the company photographer took a picture of the migration team gathered around the mainframe. It was unplugged, being gutted, with copper pipes sticking out. Years later, looking at a print, it reminded me of the old pictures of a whaling crew gathered around a whale carcass--don't get me wrong, whales are much more valuable and important. It does seem like we helped destroy something we really didn't completely understand the value of.

I was involved in an IBM mainframe to RS/6000 migration in the mid 1990s for a major aerospace company. We moved the engineering functionality to a client/server system, including many custom programs and CAD/CAM/CAE.

Like the article mentioned, migration was a Herculean task done over a period of years, with a good chance it wouldn't succeed. I worked many 70 hour weeks, I had to drive to the factory at 2AM some days to monitor jobs because only certain people had remote access. Floating point and text encoding was different between the systems, decades of legacy engineering and manufacturing data and code (having cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce) had to be translated and verified. There was a rivalry with the mainframe group who wanted it to see it fail, reluctant programmers, engineers, and line workers. On and on and on...we had to apply start-up levels of creativity and ingenuity while working in an MegaAeroCorp bureaucratic atmosphere.

Ultimately, the project was a success, although the system soon moved to PC-based desktops as graphics cards became more powerful. I got a company award from my internal engineering customers. Shortly after the dust settled, I got called into a secretive meeting with my boss and the department head, expecting a promotion and a raise, or at least an "Attaboy!" No, I was reprimanded by an HR rep with a formal note in my records about my attitude ("You risked everything by cowboying!"). I was admonished for having the gall to take a couple of sick days during the ordeal (my coworkers were concerned when they found me passed out at my workstation, my boss warned me after my time-off "If you are sick be sick" and called me a filthy name.) I was put on double secret probation.

Our whole department was eventually outsourced, and I ended my tenure there by being escorted by security to the door and told not to let it hit me in the backside. I guess I should have joined the mainframe group on the business side, in retrospect, they are still around grinding out profit statements. It was a challenge to get rid of a mainframe, maybe more so than eliminating our entire engineering support team.