Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter

As you can imagine, we have been kept quite busy since Tom and Cheryl announced they were in discussions with a company that was interested in taking over Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter.  We’ve had many emails that started with “Could you please look at xxx for me?” and ended with the real reason for their email - “And while I’m here, I was wondering who is going to be taking over the Tuning Letter?” ?. It has taken a little while for us to be able to answer that question.  All parties in the...

The mainframe recently celebrated its 60th birthday.  To hear their thoughts on what the next 60 years holds for us, join Cheryl and other industry leaders on an Open Mainframe Project webinar at noon (Eastern Time) on May 23.  The mainframe (which I call 'The Original Cloud'), and its users, have learned quite a bit over the last 60 years, so this is a great opportunity to see how that knowledge and experience might be applied over the next 60.  Will we still be using JCL in 2084?  Tune in to...

Hi All, It is hard to believe that the 2024 Winter SHARE conference is half-over already.  And what a conference it has been – our very own Cheryl Watson was presented with the SHARE Distinguished Service Award at the opening session on Monday morning. This honor recognizes Cheryl’s 47 years’ of contributions and dedication to the SHARE organization, its members, and the mainframe platform.  In addition, SHARE presented my colleague Mario Bezzi and me with the John Ehrman Award for our work on...

The 2024 Winter SHARE conference will be held in the Rosen Center hotel in Orlando, Florida, starting this coming Sunday, March 3.  This one is a 5-day conference, with the last day (Thursday) being a full day.  If you are attending, check out the agenda and download the SHARE app for your mobile device. I don’t have the Technical Agenda from a previous SHARE conference to hand, but it seems like there are more sessions in parallel than normal (for example, there are 13 sessions all at 9:15 on...

Subscribers to Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter can find the latest 114-page issue, 2023 No.4, on our publications website. In this issue, you will find the following articles: Cheryl and Tom's blog post announcing their plans to retire and close the Watson & Walker company and cease publication of Cheryl Watson's Tuning Letter.  This is truly the end of an era.  Many of our friends and readers have pointed out that Cheryl and Watson & Walker have been there for their entire working...

By now, I expect all our readers will have heard the news about Cheryl and Tom retiring.  Of course, Cheryl’s ‘We’re Retiring’ blog post thanked everyone for all the friendship and support they’ve given her over the years, but she didn’t say anything about the thanks we all owe her.  So I’m going to take a minute to do that. I want to thank Cheryl for being such a force for good in the mainframe world.  She always put the interests of her customers first – an example many of her fellow CEOs...

Dear Watson & Walker customers and friends, We have some really big news - at the end of 2024 we’re retiring and shutting down our business and the Tuning Letter. Tom and I would like to thank you all for being such fantastic customers and friends for the past many years. We especially want to thank our many Tuning Letter subscribers who have been with us since the very first issue. When we started Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter in 1991, we never dreamed it would be such a success.  We’ve...

Subscribers to Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter can find the latest 114-page issue, 2023 No.3, on our publications website. In this issue, you will find the following articles: Our Recovery at Scale article in Tuning Letter 2023 No. 2 caused quite a stir, with numerous readers commenting that it made them aware of challenges they didn't even know they had.   Well, the latest installment in this series of articles (one reviewer called them "Frank's Horror novel") is unlikely to leave you in a...