Authors

Chris Hodgins

Hailing from Scotland, Chris joined the CICSPlex SM development team in 2005. Despite his otherwise normal appearance, Chris has a sweet spot for MVS Assembly programming and a dark love of dump analysis. He is also one of the lead developers and current expert on the CICS Management Client Interface (CMCI). In his spare time, Chris is a terrible kitesurfer and can normally be found being dragged down a nearby beach.

Grant Shayler

Grant was one of the main contributors to the CICS blog and a friend to us all. Grant sadly passed away on October 2011.
http://themasterterminal.com/2011/11/16/sad-news-about-grant-shayler/

Kathryn Briscoe

Kathryn joined IBM Hursley in 2002 as a technical author for CICS, and is well known in the CICS development community for her love of both Lego and Star Wars. As well as an abiding passion for CICS and Lego, Kathryn also enjoys playing piano and reading.

Peter Havercan

Peter was born a year after WW2, installed his first CICS system 26 years later, attended his first CICS user group meeting in 1973, but didn’t join IBM in Hursley until 1985. Since then he has mainly worked on CICS Security and CICS Web Support, developing things like SSL support, document templates, and URIMAPs. By the subtle ploy of rejecting early retirement, he has now become the oldest CICS developer, but this has not prevented him from embracing modern Web2.0 technologies like Atom, Ajax, and mashups.

Peter retired from IBM on 5 August 2011.

William Yates

William Yates is a system tester for CICS and so is ‘lucky’ enough to play with all the new features of CICS before it is released.  He is interested in web services, application modernisation and CICS connectivity.  He lives with his wife and small puppy in Portsmouth.

John Tilling

John joined CICS in 1983 as a computer science student from York University and apart from 9 months back in York to finish his degree, has been in CICS ever since!  Often asked why he never moved, he always replies “No need, the cool stuff always come to CICS”, meaning CICS has always embraced new technologies head on, being leading edge, which is why its still here 40 years later. He has concentrated on how CICS gets at data, working in data access components including file control, local DLI, CICS-DBCTL, and was responsible for restructuring the CICS-DB2 Attachment Facility and the CICS-MQ Attach to exploit OTE.

James O’Grady

James joined IBM as a Tester in late 2007, and has been playing around with CICS Web Services, Java, COBOL, C and Assembler ever since.  Before joining IBM, he worked as a Systems Programmer at an insurance company, fixing some problems and causing some others!  My current favourite activity is bolting together lots of different CICS technologies to test WebSphere (BMS to CICS COBOL to CICS Web Support and back again…).  Got to love Basic Mapping Support, even if it does have less colours than the ZX Spectrum.  When not working on CICS he spends his time sleeping, eating, and dreaming of IBM products.  He’s been working long enough to have used a real 3270 terminal, and has configured Rational Developer for System Z to respond properly when he presses the real Enter button (not the one Windows thinks is Enter).

Andy Wright

Andy joined IBM (and the CICS Change Team) in 1988. Before that he read Physics and Computing at Southampton Uni, and remembers as a student saying that the Physics bit was okay, and so was the programming part, apart from when you had to stop and debug things… anyhow, fixing code has grown on him since then. He likes all the classic bits of CICS, particularly temporary storage, recovery and logging. He presents at CICS conferences, enjoys meeting customers, does work for ITSO and a lot of technical authorship. In a pre-IBM life he has been a warehouse forklift truck driver, charity balloon seller, security guard, cleaner at Goodwood racecourse, and been known to play the bongos badly.

Ian Mitchell

Ian Mitchell has the privilege of calling himself the lead Architect Distinguished Engineer for CICS Transaction Server – the privilege of working with such a crack team at Hursley, and such passionate and interesting users of CICS technology. He has worked at Hursley on CICS for more than twenty years. Before they made him Architect, when he was still allowed to write serious code, then he worked on components such as the Recovery Manager, the Logger Domain and Business Transaction Services.

Catherine Moxey

Catherine is the senior developer Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM) for CICS Transaction Server. She first worked on CICS in 1990, getting involved with lots of exciting development projects such as Shared Data Tables, VSAM RLS support and Coupling Facility Data Tables.  Then she went off to the US to work on coupling facility support in the mainframe operating system (just before it became z/OS), and followed this by stints on Web services components of WebSphere Application Server, notably the UDDI Registry.  However, the lure of CICS was too strong, and she has been back working on this excellent product since 2005.