Calling a Truce in Computing's 'Culture Wars' Copyright 1994 CAUSE. From _CAUSE/EFFECT_ Volume 17, Number 4, Winter 1994. Permission to copy or disseminate all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for commercial advantage, the CAUSE copyright and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of CAUSE, the association for managing and using information resources in higher education. To disseminate otherwise, or to republish, requires written permission. For further information, contact Julia Rudy at CAUSE, 4840 Pearl East Circle, Suite 302E, Boulder, CO 80301 USA; 303-939-0308; e-mail: jrudy@CAUSE.colorado.edu VIEWPOINT CALLING A TRUCE IN COMPUTING'S 'CULTURE WARS' by John W. Rogers Over the past decade or more there has been a mostly subtle, but at times rather intense, cultural war between computing professionals. I've seen it myself in several shops and read about it almost weekly in the various trade magazines. I'm referring to that division in our profession that has been articulated as "mainframe vs. PC." When the first PCs began to infiltrate the business world, a cultural rift within the data processing community was formed. As if a line in the sand had been drawn, computing professionals everywhere began to side with either the "mainframe camp" or the "PC camp." It seemed as though the two camps were mutually exclusive. If you were in the business, say, ten years ago, you knew that all of your colleagues either worked exclusively on mainframes or exclusively on PCs. To determine why such a rift developed over the years, let's look at some of the typical events that took place in many of our shops during those early years. When PCs first began to infiltrate our DP departments, there seemed to be an immediate segregation of staff into groups who would work on different platforms. Not long after, staff began to develop attitudes: the mainframe worker, commonly referred to as a "mainframer," really thought he/she was responsible for everything that was important, while the "PC people" thought they were on the brink of some earth-shattering discovery. Each camp soon started to make accusations about the other. Mainframe staff insisted that legitimate data processing could only be done on a hefty transaction processing unit that filled an area no less than two small houses, while the PC staff boasted that they would make mainframes (and the affiliated mainframers) obsolete! The line in the sand became firmly drawn, and the cultural rift began to widen, from subtle innuendos by the water cooler to full-blown raging arguments at staff meetings. The IT community has struggled with these issues, especially in recent years, but with the vast proliferation of client/server and distributed data technologies, one can see the potential for finally putting our profession back together again. Our current technological implementations use aspects of both microcomputer and mainframe technologies. The most successful implementations use the best attributes from both worlds, for example, PC-based, graphic user interface (GUI) tools on the front end, with mainframe-style database and transaction processing on the back end. Unfortunately, our attitudes have not always kept pace with our technology. Recently, I heard a senior manager refer to "mainframe work" in a tone of voice that implied that such work is so passe it couldn't possibly be important or have any relevance. A recent article in a popular Canadian trade magazine purported that COBOL programmers would not be able to adapt to writing code on a PC. (I guess those programmers either were born with mainframe COBOL skills or underwent lobotomies after they learned them.) And then there are the folks who gloat that a server with a hundred PCs connected to it is really a mainframe in PC clothing. As an industry, I think we have really missed the boat. We have been guilty of getting caught up in who was "right" and who was "wrong," while losing sight of what it is we really do. We need to be reminded often that we all work in technology. Computers will continue to come in all sizes, shapes, and forms, which should really be irrelevant to our task of bending and shaping that technology into a functional piece of engineering to serve our institutions' needs. Besides, with the rate of technological change of today, we are likely to see the disappearance of both the mainframe and the PC as we know them, to be replaced by some other technological advancement. I'm sure there is a bright young student out there somewhere who is busy creating the computing architecture of tomorrow. We may want to ask ourselves how we are all going to react when the computers of tomorrow make us _all_ look obsolete! And would somebody please bury that term "mainframer"? It's a disgrace to all of those professional pioneers without whom we would surely not even be in business ============================================================= NOTE: The views expressed in this article are those of the author; they are not necessarily the views of Dalhousie University. ************************************************************ John Rogers is Manager of the Production Support Unit at Dalhousie University's Administrative Computing Department, where he has been employed since 1985. He has also worked for the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and contracted for Gambia College, The Gambia, West Africa. ************************************************************ Calling a Truce in Computing's 'Culture Wars' 2'g+h/Word Work File D 3558TEXTMSTEXTMSWDBT  , P  {} o  Jeff Hansen2cx2STR q|