I replied to this days ago  -- must of got lost in the cloud ;-)
Now this thread has taken a turn toward HP vs OpenMPE and so on.

I've noticed other posts on this thread recommending .Net and VB, as a 
way to become employed, and maybe thats the way to go. I just want to 
say that (in my opinion) Microsoft is a bad investment of your time. 
I've always had somewhat of a minority viewpoint on things in general. 
In the area of business technology applications, I think Microsoft is 
ridiculous! True, Microsoft has the majority of the market, by a land 
slide. The genius behind Microsoft marketing is unheard of, while the 
ignorance of their user base keeps growing, mind boggling!


If you truly liked the HP3000, then you will see more similarities in 
the Unix world, and less in the Microsoft world.

Goto http://www.unixprogram.com <http://www.unixprogram.com/>
Read all you can!

Join as many online groups as you can in the GNU/Linux open source 
world. If you prefer cobol, go to opencobol.com, or look at GNU Fortran, 
or just "C", there are lots of resources in these areas.

I wouldn't put too much effort into learning any Microsoft technology, 
it is a moving target that drags you around helplessly everywhere it goes.
Look into platform independent technologies.

http://www.opensource.org/links

-- 
Michael Anderson,
J3k Solutions
Sr.Systems Programmer/Analyst
832.515.3868


Michael wrote:
> I always thought I would outlive the HP3000, but funny thing happened - after 
> 18 years of working for the same company who used HP3000s -- the HP3000s 
> are still there and I am not. Now I'm living unemployed in a non-mainframe 
> world as a 45-year old with only mainframe skills. I'd love to hear other 
> people's stories of how they made that adjustment -- in terms of what sort of 
> retraining was done, other alternative paths taken, etc. I'm especially 
> interested in what my next steps should be to retool for the .NET environment 
> as that seems to be predominent in my region of the country. Thanks!
>
> * To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
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>
>   

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