Cheryl Watson

Cheryl Watson is known around the world for her passion and enthusiasm for IBM mainframes and the software that runs on them. She is most well-known for her z/OS (formerly MVS) newsletter, Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter, published in 1991.

Cheryl discovered her love of computers in 1965 when taking a math class at Portland State University and using an IBM 1620 to calculate PI to 30 precision points! After graduation, she went to work at Consolidated Freightways as a trainee programmer – first in 1401/7010 Autocoder, and then in assembler and COBOL. She was on the system programming team the year when their first IBM 360 was installed (1966) and has avidly followed the 360’s transformation ever since. Her favorite z/OS topics include SMF, WLM, SRM, z/OSMF, and chargeback. She’s never met an SMF record she didn’t like.

After working with several software development firms and in the Amdahl education center, she joined EDS in 1970 for a total of 11 years (on and off), working as an educator, performance analyst, capacity planner, system programmer, CICS administrator, and trouble-shooter in many of their offices around the world. A lot of her outsourcing experience came from this work as an outsourcer. Following EDS, she joined Morino Associates in their England and Germany offices, returning to the US in 1984, and working in SAS on their MICS product (now supported by CA).

After meeting Tom Walker in 1986, Cheryl became an independent consultant, often consulting back to customers of outsourcers, so she saw the other (and often uglier) side of the situation. She taught performance and internal classes and wrote for various journals, such as Bob Thomas’ MVS Journal (now zTech Journal), and TechSupport magazine. In 1988 Cheryl and Tom formed their own company, Watson & Walker, Inc. See the company history above for their history together. For a fuller bio of Cheryl, see a white paper created by NewEra Software and available on their website.