Hi. I'm Jeff Bisti and I'm so glad you're taking this course and I think we're going to have a whole lot of fun doing it. No matter what brought you here, whether this is your first time exploring a computer platform or your ninth or 12th. The mainframe environment is all of IT in one place, and careers, and mainframes, will keep you engaged learning and current. Now if you're thinking, "I don't even know the first thing about mainframes", just take that thought and just throw it out the window. This course is for you. We will quickly bring you up to speed and introduce you to the basics from the hardware, the operating systems, the languages, all the technology that powers today's global economy. So a little bit about mainframes, today more than ever, Fortune 500 companies are pushing massive amounts of transactions. Billions of transactions important transactions think paychecks, health care, insurance, your phone, your credit card, your bank account, your Internet. They all have to be fast, secure, and always available, and that's what mainframes do. It's the computer behind the scenes that specializes in scale, security, and reliability. The mainframe is a computer that is built and when I say built, I mean it is physically and literally purpose built for big critical business applications. It earns its up time through design, it's testing, and it's features. All of which, you'll learn about here. Now I can remember when I was coming out of college, I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do but I knew that I wanted to work on something real that made an undeniable difference and that's this platform and I hope you're excited too. I'm actually a little jealous because you get to start right now. You're coming in at such a great time. There's so much going on. So some of the things you're going to learn about in this course, you're going to learn about the different operating systems, you can run on a mainframe. Of course, you can run Linux, for a lot of this course, we're going to focus on z/OS an operating system built specifically for the mainframe. You're going to learn about mainframe security because that is vitally important for applications dealing with financial and personal data. You'll learn about all the ways specialized accelerators can help speed up things like cryptography, compression, network communications, managing data, virtualization, data management, and did I start you thinking about those critical can't ever go down business applications? Because you'll learn about building the scalability, resiliency, and availability, that makes those applications possible. The best thing is, we're going to be teaching you skills that will absolutely differentiate you from others. You'll be able to put these skills to use from day one. Tell you what, you walk into a job interview, you tell them you know IOCDS, sis plex, palm live, and DFSMS, trust me, you're in a good place. These are all highly practical skills and we've got them all covered for you. So some of the content here, we got labs, you're going to be able to log into a real live mainframe system. They won't be simulated, no animated screenshots or anything like that. This is a real mainframe and you'll be doing real tasks and building real skills. During the course, we'll have links to documents and web pages. These are critical parts of the course. So make sure you study those. We're also going to have some questions along the way so you can test your knowledge. So do this, as you're learning, take lots of notes, and when he hears something that makes you go, "You know what? That sounds interesting." I bet I'd be really good at that or maybe there's something that caught your attention and you don't want to stop right then, write it down, so that when you're finished, you have a list of things that you can dive deeper into. I've been working on this platform for 18 years doing all sorts of things, and I've always felt like the platform has been moving with me and that's pretty important. So get comfy, gives your arms a stretch, and let's get going. There's a whole lot to cover.
