In this episode of Mainframe Coven, Jessielaine Punongbayan (Product Manager, Dynatrace) and Richelle Anne Craw (Software Engineer, Beta Systems Software) chat with Former SHARE President Pam Taylor, a historian turned mainframer who ended up making history herself. Pam shares her journey into enterprise tech, her advocacy for standards and user-focused solutions, and how she blends technical expertise with creative storytelling.
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Transcript:
[Intro Voice]: This is the Mainframe Connect podcast brought to you by the Linux Foundation’s Open Mainframe Project, sponsored by Phoenix Software International and Vicom Infinity, a Converge Company. Mainframe Connect includes the “I am a Mainframer” series, the riveting “Mainframe Voices” series, and other content exploring relevant topics with mainframe professionals and offering insights into the industry and technology. Today’s episode is from the 10-part “Mainframe Coven” mini-series honoring the past, present, and future women of IT.
Jessielaine (Jelly): Hello everyone and welcome to Mainframe Coven!
Today is a very special episode because we have a very special guest. Today, we’re welcoming our very own first guest. She’s a historian mainframer that made history.
Today, we have Pam Taylor. She is a former SHARE President and Director of Industry Relations. She’s a bestselling historical novelist. She’s a History major. She’s a classically trained musician and a certified private pilot.
Pam, you’re so awesome and very well rounded! Thank you so much for joining us today and welcome to the Coven!
Pam Taylor: I’m delighted to be here! And I really appreciate the invitation.
Richelle: Yeah, welcome to the Coven!
I wanna start with you being a history major. I want to start with your academic background in history. I want to get your perspective, because in our previous episodes, we focused on the women in our technological history. From your perspective, how did your academic training influence how you saw the early contributions of women in tech?
Pam: You know, at the time that I really got into the technology field, it was before there were extensive academic programs in Computer Science. There were Computer Science degrees, they were generally in the Mathematics department. But a lot of us came to the IT field from a variety of different directions. In fact, at one point, the team I was managing: I was a History major, one of my team members had a PhD in Chemical Engineering, the other one had a Masters in Community and Regional Planning, one of them had been a Mathematics Major and had gone back and taught gotten her Education certificate and taught in a high school for a while and the final one was a Russian language major. And we all just sort of came to IT because we had touched on programming, either having had some programming courses during our academic years or some exposure to it or seminars and continuing education training classes somewhere along the way.
So I just happened to hit things, I think maybe at the right time, when you could easily make the transition from one discipline to the other without having to go back and get yet another academic degree to get there.
Richelle: That’s awesome to hear!
Jelly: Let me just ask this question, what was the journey like from studying history to transitioning into your first role in enterprise IT?
Pam: Well, I was one of those people that did take a FORTRAN class amid all my other courses when I was in college. But it was just one class and it was just the introductory class. But then I worked in academia for my first job out of college. I was on the staff in a couple of different Engineering departments. And some of the things I did were associated with automating the budgeting process.
And in the second organization where I worked, they had been keeping their faculty members’ biographical records in a version that somebody had to type up. Every time something changed, it had to be retyped and reprinted off. And one of the projects that I took on was to actually put all of that information into a database, so that all you had to do was add the new record each time and instantly you could request a print out of the results, rather than having to go through this very manual process each time.
And that was kind of what gave me enough background that when I stepped away from my academic staff job and took an opportunity that came my way in a software vendor firm, I really had enough solid background that I could make the transition fairly smoothly. It didn’t hurt that I had mentors and friends in the firm where I took the job. And in fact that’s how I got my introduction, but it’s like everything else. Yeah finding a job these days is a very very different sort of process than it was then, but it still never hurts to have some sort of connection, contacts to get your foot in the door. And that’s sort of what the journey was like.
I began in a group that was responsible for porting FORTRAN code from one hardware operating system environment to another and at the time there were really quite a lot of computer vendors out there and even you know, even just looking at the IBM mainframe. There was IBM, there was Amdahl and even on both of their systems which were hardware extremely similar there was a plethora of operating systems that ran on those. And so to get the interoperability and the common user experience that you needed, you literally had to port this code from one to another. So my FORTRAN background came in handy and that’s sort of how the transition was made.
Richelle: So it sounds like there were a lot of transferable skills, like from when you were in academia and then when you first started in your IT career.
Pam: Yeah I think that’s a fair characterization.
Richelle: And you mentioned interoperability in terms of your work with different operating systems in your different software companies that you worked at. Can you talk more about what that means, what shaped your views on that topic, and why was that important for you?
Pam: At the time that I took my first software job, there were still actually multiple mainframe vendors. I can count at least 4 on my hands without thinking about it too much. There were quite a number of what, at the time, were characterized as midrange systems. It was back in the heyday of Digital Equipment Corporation and Prime. And Hewlett Packard still had midrange computers then. They had not focused their attention on the personal computers and the laptops. And so our group needed to ensure that the software behaved, as far as the user was concerned, in exactly the same way across what actually wound up being 16 different computing environments.
And that’s where I first got my taste for the criticality of both interoperability and common predictable understandable user experience. So at the time that I first stepped into this, it felt a bit like the wild wild west and I suppose, in retrospect, it might have been.
But it really was a stepping stone, if you will, to a lot of what I did later in the standards arena and in working with SHARE.
Jelly: So you mentioned SHARE. We know that you volunteered in SHARE from 1992 to 2017 and you held a variety of roles in that organization. So can you tell us a brief overview of what SHARE is for those listening who don’t know what SHARE is and what were your roles in this organization.
Pam: Yeah, SHARE began in the mid-1950s as a group of individuals who came together from some really big US based corporations. They were sort of the first commercial users of IBM Mainframes. And they came together as a user group and an advisory group. Their goals were both to help each other in this sort of brave new world of computing that was now becoming more mainstream and also to give input to the major vendors and the major players in the group.
Originally, they started as a partnership only with IBM. But over time, and this is over decades, as the computing world evolved, these midrange computers emerged. SHARE didn’t really have much engagement with them. As IBM got into the PC space, then of course that was a natural alignment. And then as Unix became more prevalent, both on the mainframe and on workstation systems, that was yet another area where the technology was still in its infancy.
And the opportunity for the user community to influence the direction that things went was still very, very strong. And so it was in that period of time, when the new technology was emerging and needing this kind of user insight, that SHARE really began to think of itself as more than just a mainframe user group, but as an opportunity for professionals from across the enterprise computing world to come together and continue to do the same thing they had been doing, which is sharing user experiences, sharing tips and tricks and techniques that they had developed within their own shop. And they could do it in a safe environment. Because the rules of SHARE require that people be able to speak openly and freely and not worry about this company trying to take something or hire people away from another company or, you know, any kind of competitive things. The whole competitive model was not what SHARE was all about.
By the time I really became active in the mid-90s, the embrace of this enterprise computing and the fact that SHARE was a great home for enterprise computing professionals to learn more and advance their careers was really pretty well established. I started out just volunteering with one of the more narrow, they call them projects in the organization, but you can think of it as a small committee that created the technical program and the sessions around a single piece of technology. In my case it was around a programming language, a scripting language called REXX. There were similar things for DB2, for RACF for systems management technologies, for performance management, for performance tuning, for all of the various disciplines required in an enterprise data center.
So I started my SHARE experience in one of those narrow areas and then gradually moved into helping define broader programs, particularly in the area of open systems. From that I got tapped to be on the board of directors and that’s where I got engaged with SHARE’s participation in the international standards community.
Richelle: That’s cool.
Pam: And then eventually, I was elected president and the rest as they say…
Jelly: I’m so proud of you. That’s so cool!
Richelle: I think I want to go back just a bit to highlight, really, the success of the decimal floating point standard that was successfully adopted in the IBM Z chips. So I want to ask if you have something like more to say to that or how did you feel personally when that happened?
Pam: It felt like quite a positive experience both for SHARE and then of course for me as well because I got to represent SHARE to know that the solution that SHARE had championed and that I got to represent is actually what’s implemented on the mainframe and is powering so much of what keeps business running in today’s world.
Jelly: You were the president of SHARE, have you observed some shifts in how women are represented in technical or leadership roles over the years?
Pam: In the organizations that I’ve worked for, I’ve always observed that the women in the organizations did seem to be valued, that they did progress to leadership roles. And at the time that I came into SHARE.. Well, and you know, even going back to the early days, there were a lot of women that helped to shape that organization and that were really instrumental in how it evolved and that actually held leadership. I was not the first female president of the organization nor was I the last. And so it’s been something that I’ve been really pleased to see.
Now if you were to look at the demographics of the people who attended the SHARE conferences over the years: was it more male than female? Yes, there’s no doubt about that.
It’s interesting as I’ve watched from a distance first from my past president role and then just, you know… Well, I’ll always be a past president. But just observing more from a distance now, I’m starting to see that pattern re-emerge a bit.
And I really can’t put my finger on whether that is just a side effect of people finding other ways to get the additional continuing education or additional training that they need because there are so many more opportunities out there now than there used to be. You used to have to go to an IT conference of some sort. There are so many more events to attend. The software vendors themselves, IBM third party software vendors, they all have their own events. And there are limited training dollars available within every organization. So it’s really difficult to know whether what I’m seeing is a generic trend or whether it’s just the fact that the women are spreading themselves around and going to different events. And so the overall demographics might be fairly similar to what I observed at the time that I was president of the SHARE organization.
I’ve been retired for a couple of years now, more than a couple, but we won’t talk about that, so I’m not observing firsthand. You would have better handle firsthand what the demographic distribution is in IT in general today. I’d like to think that women are continuing to be valued and finding lots of places to contribute and to progress into leadership positions because they’re just as capable.
Jelly: Yeah, of course they are.
Well in my observation, there are more and more women joining in STEM. There are a lot of programs to teach children, especially girls, on how to code and join STEM.
So when we talk about leadership in general, do you have any advice for women especially me and Richelle going into leadership?
Pam: Well I think my success was a combination of both luck and attitude. I throw a lot of things into the attitude bucket, but don’t discount the luck bucket. But I think the attitude you bring to what you can do, what you want to do, what you aspire to, helps you take advantage of the luck that happens to fall in your path.
I suppose if there were one single bit of advice I might offer, it would be: always be prepared to say “YES”. Because you never know where an opportunity is going to lead. I know that many people are far more comfortable with having a plan for their career and charting the steps they want to take and so on. And that’s good. It works for them and I’m happy for them. But I hope that they will also be prepared to say “YES” when opportunities present themselves.
I’ll give you an example. This goes back to my early days, when one of the programmers in this first company that I worked for came to me with an opportunity. A lot of our customers were asking for an interface between our financial modeling software and DB2 and there just was not room for it on the regular schedule. So my colleague came to me and said, “You know, you could write this. You’re in a slow period right now, a slow phase for your team. You could write this. You wanna do it?”
First of all, I knew nothing about DB2. Secondly, I wasn’t sure… I didn’t tell him this, but I didn’t know whether I really… whether my FORTRAN skills were really that good to be able to interface this mature software product with this widely used significant database system. But I said yes, and I did it. And it wound up being exactly what the users wanted and I felt really good about it. And that gave me the confidence to move on to the next thing.
Later on, when someone offered me the opportunity to jump ship from the company I was in to go to a startup, I questioned whether I should do it or not. But I said yes, and it turned out that the startup went belly up fairly quickly, so that may not have been the best opportunity. But it put me in the right physical location for the next really important job and absolutely had been the right thing to do.
So my key advice, I think, is: always be prepared to say “YES”.
Richelle: Chills!
Jelly: That is very powerful, thank you! Thank you for that advice! I will personally keep that in mind.
Pam: And I wish you the very best with all your “YES” answers.
Richelle: Thank you!
Jelly: So what I really find fascinating is that your work shifted from an IT career, which is a very successful IT career, I might say, to writing medieval fiction, which is also super successful. So really congratulations to that.
Can you see any parallels or linkages between those two worlds?
Pam: Well, they do seem pretty disjointed, don’t they? But actually, I did discover something myself. I had done an enormous amount of writing in my IT career: technical white papers, installation instructions for software, user documentation, all things that had to be very technical, very precise, very accurate.
And yet I was always intrigued by .. I’ve been a reader all my life and I’ve always been intrigued by how people do storytelling. And I wondered if there was any way that one set of skills could transition to the other. So I sat down, and you know this was in my spare time: evenings and weekends, and I started trying to write some fiction. And it was really bad.
But then as my career evolved and I got more and more into doing presentations, either for conferences or for user groups or in my final career position where I was in a group that developed product strategy for an entire division, presentations of the results of our research to executive decision makers, I suddenly realized that what presentations are is in fact storytelling. You have to know what you want people to take away from this and you have to present it in a way that they are engaged with it and want to want to know more, want to follow through, want to see where you’re taking this, what’s gonna come at the end, what’s the next step.
And so when I had that realization that I actually had been doing a form of storytelling for a number of years, that was kind of liberating, in terms of saying, well, maybe you can do this. And so I tried my hand at another one. That one went into the drawer as well. I don’t know if that one will ever come out and become a book, even though I do know now how to improve it.
But the first book evolved from one of those: late night, you can’t fall asleep at 2 in the morning, or you got woken up at 2 in the morning cause your brain wouldn’t shut off, maybe it was processing, you know. We’ve all had that, particularly in our profession, where you’ve got something going on at work that you just can’t quite get to and you know your mind keeps you awake half the night trying to sort this out. Well, this was one of those 2:00 in the morning things, where just a paragraph came to me and I don’t know what was behind it. Brains work in really mysterious ways. But the next morning, it was still with me. And I wrote it down and I said, “You know, I can do something with this.” And I took it from there. Now did the book get revised half a dozen times before it ever became a book any publisher was worth taking a look at?
That realization that I had actually been doing storytelling, just a different kind of storytelling, was what freed me to actually explore what turned into a second career.
Richelle: That is awesome.
Jelly: I love it. I love it so much.
Richelle: Are there also parallels between the readers of your books and software users who are reading those documentations and user manuals that you were writing?
Pam: Probably. You certainly have to be aware of the details. My books are all set in the 14th century and so, as in technical writing, you have to be precise, you have to get the technology correct, you have to get the terminology correct. If you’re going to write about the 14th century, you really need to make sure that things like travel times and distances make sense for that era. I can look on Google Maps, for example, and see that it’s 100 miles between these two points. My character is in point A and needs to be at point B. Well, today if I just look up Google Maps and they show me the time it takes to get there, it’s what? an hour and a half, two hours, you know, depending on whether it’s all interstate motorways or whether it’s back roads. But that would not be the case when you were traveling on horseback. So you have to pay attention to those kinds of details. And if you don’t get that right, readers will call you out on it. They will recognize the things that are inauthentic in a story, in a fictional narrative, just as much as they will stumble and struggle if things aren’t precise and accurate in a technical piece. So you really do have to pay attention to that level of detail.
And you also have to pay attention to keeping your readers engaged. How many times have you picked up something and it was 700 pages and your first thought is, “Oh my God, this is going to be boring. I’ll never get through this.” But if you read the first 20 pages and the author grabs you, with either some event or some character that you just fall in love with, then you’re gonna stick with it. You’re gonna keep going, keep turning those pages and suddenly you’re gonna be, “What? Wait a minute, this is over? This is done?” And so there’s some parallels there. You have to keep the attention of the individual that you’re addressing.
Richelle: I can certainly relate. If I am hooked, it doesn’t matter if it’s 700 pages or 70 pages, I’m there for the whole story.
Jelly: So before we end, some rapid fire questions. I’m gonna ask you some quick questions. You just give us whatever it is that you have in your mind. So first question: who is your favorite historical figure you’d love to invite to a SHARE session?
Pam: I think it might be Ada Lovelace. She has only recently come into her own. If I could pick more than one, I think I’d start with Ada Lovelace, but then I think the women of Bletchley Park, who helped break the Enigma code would be my second choice.
Jelly: Yeah, I think so. They would be interested in that.
Richelle: So my question is: if one character from the Second Son Chronicles had to step into a modern tech role, who would adapt the fastest?
Pam: You know, I think it might be Alfred’s daughter, Juliana. I’m gonna try to do this without any spoilers. But if you work your way through the series and you get to volume 7, you will find that she is the one who comes back from a journey with all kinds of interesting new ideas she has seen. This is happening in the early days of the Renaissance, by the way. And she’s the one who wants to bring some of these new things from what she’s observed to Alfred’s court.
Richelle: Yeah, adaptability.
Jelly: She’s very open minded. Yeah, right. Last question: if we were to create a Mainframe Coven Museum exhibition, what artifact would best represent your journey in tech?
Pam: Oh gosh, you want a quick answer to these questions, right?
Jelly: That’s what I was thinking: this is not a rapid fire question.
Pam: You said rapid fire questions. I didn’t say rapid fire answers.
Gosh I’m really not sure. I can think of several but perhaps the one I might be proudest of would be…
I could say the obvious. I could say the gavel that represents being president of SHARE, I could say the actual published ANSI standard for REXX, because by the time it was published, I was actually vice chair of the committee that developed the standard.
But I think what I might land on is a sales kit that I did for our product for my company. At the time, the product that we had was not cool. It was considered useful, important, a huge money maker, but it wasn’t getting investment. And it wasn’t getting as much attention from the sales force as it once did. So I decided what they needed was a refresher of all their materials and we built them. My team built them a sales kit with new presentations, new white papers, we packaged all this up and printed it for him and on CD and sent it out to the sales force. This would have been in the early 2000s.
And I was utterly stunned in 2017 or 2018, when I had lunch with one of my former colleagues. I had retired by then. I had lunch with one of my former colleagues who was lead sales support for a particular product line at the time and he said, “We are still using those white papers and presentations that you put together back so long ago.” And I was floored.
I was just completely taken aback because it had been a spur of the moment idea. Something to try to rekindle some interest where it seemed to be dwindling. And it had taken root in a way that I never could have predicted.
Jelly: Oh, I love that.
Richelle: I think I’m very inspired by the impact that you had and have up until now, so thank you for sharing your story.
Pam: Hey, it’s been my pleasure. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation.
Jelly: Me too, I’m very inspired and I’m very proud of you. And thank you so much, thank you very very much.
Pam: Well and I am very impressed with what you guys are doing in terms of having founded the coven and presenting the podcast. It’s really very exciting to see how you’re taking this by the reins and really driving it forward.
Jelly: Thank you and now you’re part of our Coven! Yeah!
Pam: Oh, thank you. I’m pleased to be part of it.
Jelly: Well thank you so much for joining our podcast. We really appreciate it: the story that you shared and you being here.
And thank you to all of our viewers for listening. Join us next time. Please subscribe and rate the show wherever you listen to your podcast.
[Outro Voice]: Thank you for tuning in to the Mainframe Connect Podcast. This episode is part of the Mainframe Coven 10-part miniseries, sponsored by Phoenix Software International and Vicom Infinity, a Converge Company. Like what you heard? Subscribe to get every episode or watch us online at openmainframeproject.org. Until next time, this is the Mainframe Connect Podcast.
Links and Resources Mentioned in the Episode:
