Zen of the Green Screen: A Collection of Mainframe Haikus

We at MAKE Technologies spend far too much time thinking and talking about mainframes, the crazy languages they run and legacy issues. These are the results of a mainframe-haiku-contest we held last week, in preparation for some awesome SWAG we’re planning for our Oracle OpenWorld booth at Intel’s Inside Innovation Showcase:

Sun rises in West
Birds fall from sky, hordes panic;
Hide from the mainframe.

Such an old system
It runs your business somehow
A constant worry

Flowers in spring,
Mainframe with empty meaning;
old is new again.

A buzzing mainframe:
sorts, moves, sorts, exports
Finds stillness.

JCL calls COBOL
looks up empty records in DB2
A lotus blooms.

Lonely language;
the last developer turns off the
green glow. Silence.

Batch can not sleep
MOVEs age into variable
sleeps again.

Process records at night
More every day, can’t keep up.
Batch window widens.

Without a lamp
the moonlight turns
my mainframe black

Garbage in:
code converts 4GL to OO;
garbage out.

Ancient, forgotten, cobweb
Unraveled, unscrambled, untangled, unknotted
Meet Tiger Mustang Dolphin.

Batches! JCLs!
How will they fix all this mess
When I have retired?

Mainframe costs soaring
Still the business asks for more.
We will get you off.

CIO demands
Service Orientation!
Show me the money.

Opened the door to
Modernization project.
Now the cat is gone.

Running on mainframe
Like beating a tired old horse.
We will get you off.

Still patching old code
Like a leaky old rooftop?
We will get you off.

Snow on silver hair
Old hands stiff under green screens
Y2K Redux

Hal, open the file
Hal, open the file, Hal
open the, please Hal

COBOL days of dust
Young minds never die
Old is new again

Batch Job override
Transaction code is long lost.
Where is that post-it?

require upgrade;
$time = now() || $never;
$modernize || die;

Sound of one hand clapping
The legacy system was
Enter MAKE and get the applause