z/OS meets Zen: mainframe haiku
- Shankland covered the tech industry for more than 25 years and was a science writer for five years before that. He has deep expertise in microprocessors, digital photography, computer hardware and software, internet standards, web technology, and more.
Launching contests to try to attract programmer interest in the latest hardware is nothing new. But launching a contest to write poetry about a decades-old server lineage is not a strategy one would have expected from the most stalwart of computing companies.
IBM, through its , encouraged students to write haiku about the refrigerator-sized, reliable but expensive System z line.
Among the entries that stuck most closely to common haiku nature themes was one from Van Landrum at the University of South Alabama:
The wind blows softly
Through the leaves of autumn. Wait,
That's just the mainframe
Poetry might be a subject for the literary side of the liberal arts, but that didn't stop Frank Migacz of Northern Illinois University:
EBCDIC, ASCII
Which of the two is preferred?
Either way, convert
Jason Arnold, also of Northern Illinois University, went even farther down the nerd path:
SCA, RB
IOB and TCB
Control blocks are fun
Aaron McMahan of West Virginia University at Parkersburg, while not strictly adhering to the conventional 5-7-5 syllable form of English haiku, did use the poetic form to look inward:
Mainframe, desire
But not too much, or it will
Surely overheat