I’m pleased, but astonished.

In my first job, there were 8 of us graduates joining an organisation heavily into mainframes. I ended up in one of the distributed teams, but a couple of the others ended up learning COBOL programming. I was forced through training in TSO and various other wacky things, thinking “urgh! how horrible!”.

I’ve learned the error of my ways now, of course. I remain a distributed platforms person. However, with Message Broker taking centre stage in a lot of SOA projects, I’ve learned much about copybooks, and the benefits of running enterprise systems on servers that never go down…