A pioneer shares history

And here is another great one. In the April issue, Novell Connection Magazine features “A Decade of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on the IBM Mainframe”. Among others, Bill Tobey did interview Marcus Kraft, the pioneer at Novell / SUSE for Linux on the mainframe. 10 years ago, Marcus (who joined SUSE from IBM) led the engineering efforts for Linux on mainframes with IBM. And in his current position, as the Product Manager for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for System z, he still has significant influence on its design and technology. Listening to Marcus – when he talks about the background and has all these tiny little “side notes”, and when you feel you start “reading between the lines” – is more than fun.

Bill Tobey felt the same – an he did cast the experience into a great article. Want an example?

“May 17, 2010 marks the tenth anniversary of commercially distributed, fully supported Linux on the IBM mainframe.. On that day in 2000, SuSE (later SUSE LINUX AG, acquired by Novell in early 2004) announced the first availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for S/390. An eventful decade later, it’s difficult to recall just how improbable this development seemed at the time, but it’s worth pausing to reconsider how Linux reconnected the diverging worlds of mainframe and distributed computing, and the impact of that development on the past and future evolution of enterprise IT.”

Curious now? Read the entire article here:
http://www.novell.com/connectionmagazine/2010/04/sles_on_ibm_mainframe_one.html