Why The Dinosaurs Won't Die

DaveAtFraud writes "Ace's Hardware has a nice introductory article to the animal that will not die: The Mainframe. Ever wonder why these things are still around and what makes them different from a PC or UNIX box? The article is IBM-centric so there's no discussion of say the CDC Cyber series but when most people don't even believe that mainframes exist anymore, what the hay, let's disabuse them of that notion first. Hopefully, the author will follow up with the additional promised articles that go into more technical detail but this is a good place to start. I wonder if they still make card readers, too?" This guide came out last month, but it's worth looking through, even just for the pictures.

Comments

Re:Why i think mainframes aint dying

[ottffssent]

Hey article-boy! We're not talking about mainframes that were built 30 years ago and still running. We're talking about the concept of a mainframe, and the new ones built yesterday that will run 30-year-old software because they're that backward-compatible.

Now, go spend as much time reading as you just spent posting silliness - it's a good short intro full of cool stuff. *My* computer at least insists on stopping working when I unplug CPUs, break DRAM chips, and unplug the box it's in. So I think computers that don't are pretty durn cool.

Re:Pft, overanalysis

[Walterk]

So you're saying that every construction on earth is exactly 3 times too big? Wow dude!

Re:Why i think mainframes aint dying

[JonK]

In truth, you're the one on crack: one of the principle reasons for the Great IBM Slump of the early 90s was the fact that (interchangeable blue-suited CEO who preceded Lou G) decided that a good way to boost revenues was to sell mainframes to the customer rather than leasing them. Result? Several good quarters, as mainframe sales came straight through on the bottom line, followed by a number of spectacularly quarters, as one of IBM's principal revenue streams ground to a halt, and ending up with the biggest quarterly loss ever recorded. So yes, there are a lot of decade-old MVS systems which are owned outright.