I’m outing myself as being a bit older than your usual student – 38. When I grew up, it was not normal that everyone had a computer. Mobile phones started to be popular when I was 14, although I was still considered being the weird one having one of the first mobile phones in my class. Yet technology was always part of my life. I was very lucky being the daughter of a Head of IT. For me, the perks were being able to use a laptop from early on and becoming familiar with MS-DOS, Windows 3.1 and all the following versions, and having access to the Internet. How exciting it was to get our first desktop computer, a Compaq Presario. The most interesting tool: You could use it to make phone calls through the computer! Yeah, I know. Nothing special nowadays. But in the 90s, this was pretty cool!
I loved it when my dad had to work weekends (guess I was the only one of the family happy about that). Because that meant I could go with him to the office. There was the huge server room with a lot of big magnetic tape units and an IBM AS/400. The iconic black screen with green letters always fascinated me. THIS was something I wanted to work with in the future!
I went to an IT school and interned with my dad’s employer, eventually working with said IBM AS/400. At that time, the old server room was turned into an office, and the more modern servers had moved into a small room. After working part-time for a top company in the field of enterprise job scheduling and workload automation, I got offered a full-time position by them after graduation. It felt rewarding being a software developer. Being able to write some code to automate tasks and make people’s lives easier felt meaningful.
Fast-forward a couple of years: Still interested in technology, I wanted to know more about the guts of our computers and how they work, thus deciding to study Bachelor of Computer Science. I cherish the past including all my floppy discs with my first BASIC programs and try to keep up with the more and more rapidly evolving technology.
I came across the Z Ambassador program last year and seized the opportunity to be part of it. Learning more about the IBM Z, sharing this knowledge and even surprising university professors that the mainframe “is still a thing”. It’s a highly underrated system which astonishes most people who learn more about it. Mainframes run the world, and because they are doing that so well nobody notices them.
Master the Mainframe and Z Xplore provide perfect opportunities to get a taste of the versatility of the IBM Z and offer the rare chance to work with an actual mainframe. I’m sure many more people will become addicted to enterprise computing when trying out those learning systems.