Welcome to the Legacy Guild Website

Congratulations! You've got this far, which means that you have found us. This is no trivial detail. It means that, however you found our website, you have an interest in Legacy Systems. And the Legacy Guild does also.

Please take a look at our Mission Statement, accessible from our Home page. It is quite explicit on what our advocacy agenda is, which is to be for Legacy Systems.

We are soliciting content to place in Downloads and Links to provide the facts and the justifications to promote Legacy Systems, and to answer in a reasoned and rational way the nay-sayers who have an attitude that the time for Legacy Systems has come and gone, and all that remains is an object-oriented world, Java, C#, C++, and those other "languages du jour". To paraphrase Thomas Paine, in his pamphlet Common Sense,  "We offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense."

Now there is nothing wrong with those more modern languages, and frankly, there are plenty of applications where their use is superior to the older, legacy languages such as CoBOL, FORTRAN, and PL/I. However, our position is that so many of the newer languages were designed from the beginning to be general purpose languages, and not application-specific, such as CoBOL for financial applications, or FORTRAN for scientific applications, or C for device drivers and operating system utilities.

So if you are an expert in Service Oriented Architecture, or an, IBM z/os expert, CICS expert, DB2 database admin, a journeyman CoBOL/CICS coder, a non-IBM CoBOL coder eager to learn IBM mainframe skills, a technical/proposal writer interested in keeping these Legacy Systems alive, or a project manager who wants to lead that effort, then you are in the right place.

So, once again, read our Mission statement. If you can agree with it, then you are welcome to click on the Join button on our Home page. That is the only requirement for membership in Legacy Guild.

To contact me, see our Contact link from the Home page.

Welcome aboard!

Kenneth Shafer
President, American Flier, Inc. and Chief Correspondent for the Legacy Guild