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O'Reilly On The Importance Of The Mainframe Heritage
theodp writes "After exchanging e-mail with mainframe software pioneer Mario Morino, Tim O'Reilly writes 'It's important for the open source community to look more at the software heritage of the mainframe era.' O'Reilly might want to take a look at how Marino's own MICS software has been used since the 80's to automatically charge IBM mainframe users for printed material that could be ordered from PC clients with a single action by using billing and shipping information that was previously stored on a Mainframe server. The whole process might seem oddly familiar."
How much does a old mainframe go for these days?
Something that would make for a nice "on the weekend" toy...
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
So this provides evidence of prior art to claims 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25 of the Bezos patent. It may also provide prior art to claims 7, 9, 14 and 15 - does anyone know whether there is a web interface to this system and if so whether it existed before September 12, 1997?
It looks like the only thing Bezos has patented is the act of purchasing an item over the 'net by the '...speaking of a sound...' (claim 4, claim 18), and that's technology he hasn't implemented.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
A lot of the programmers and project managers put in place by IBM and Sears were old school mainframe guys (and gals) and they did some groundbreaking work, including adapting a TPF system (Transaction Processing Facility for airline reservations) for delivering content and email messages. They built a huge place in northern Westchester county to handle an anticipated ten million members. I have to give the rank and file people at Prodigy a lot of credit for going beyond mainframes and adapting to Unix, AIX, TCP/IP, etc. and making it work pretty well. A series of incompetent managements sank the good ship Prodigy. The people rowing the oars always did their best.
Set up a Vax system in his house as a prank, as I recall.
Reading the header, the article, and some of the links made me realize how you can recognize when Linux really "makes it" in an organization:
Linux has really "made it" when the sysadmins have to run system accounting to generate chargebacks for compute resources used on the Linux box.
I just want to point out that proper credit is due to RMS -
who was the one who stood up to consiously prolong the golden age of sharing.
I second that but can't use email right now. Can somebody send Rob a mail from me? Thanks
With US copyright duration extended longer and longer (Thanks, Disney !) this is terribly silly.
By staying too near to the old mainframe stuff we just breed more and more SCO-like lawsuits.
Just one wacko company buy old heritage mainframe IP and starts to sue all Linux related business, because some fool decided few months ago that it would be cool that the NUGABOGORK module in the 2.8.342 kernel should work like the trogolyte algorithm on the IBM 1920.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
I'm a toolie from way back with a few contributions of my own, SEARCH, a flat file database query tool (used Boyer-Moore string search to make it real fast), and REACC/QUACC, a command that let you determine whether a R/O CMS disk had changed and needed to be reaccessed.
Also some that never got off the ground. I had this idea to emulating temporary files without doing actual i/o to disks. Couldn't call it virtual i/o since there was already a mainframe i/o method called that. I described it to a friend who said oh yeah, unix has those, they're called file pipes. !!? This is the late 70's or very early 80's when unix was basically unknown at IBM. So a first for unix in that case. File pipes were cool and I was probably the only one who had them on mainframes at that time.
So yeah, other than that, we mainframe guys invented everything first. But we never believed the stories told by those ex Future Systems guys. They claimed they invented everything first.
At least the IBM mainframe and CDC projects I worked on were not open source.
They were huge though, we often had more than 400 programmers working on the one system, each working on their own little corner (well you prayed you didn't overlap). The banks and insurance companies had even bigger teams.
I am vaguely aware that the DECUS (DEC user group) kept VMS going on their own while Digital then Compaq then HP tried to decide if it was profitable or not. I think the obstinate customers who insist on something reliable have swayed HP now. Corporate policy is something like: "as long as you don't cost us any money, you can do what you want". They might change their minds if they see a profit in it again.
early 70's ( of course no orders from PCs - didn't exist that time but ). Working in an insurance company, our customers, banks, city/county fleet managers, shipping companies, etc.. were able to order print jobs and were billed eletronically based on information we had of them. Small jobs could even be routed to their RJE printers - slow, or sent on tape. Later on at start of 80's I had mainframe customers selling print services in their IBM 3800 laser printers ( 215 pages/min ). It's impressive to see 4-5 of those printing almost 24h / day. Almost all the orders came over network ( BSC, x.25 or SNA still at that time ) and were billed on their bank by paper type, pre-processing requirements, layout requirements and post-processing, etc.. All the customer information was, of course, in mainframe databases. The real challenge was the world wide requirements in a bank to get the print to follow the user independent of the printing subsystem, IBM, Tandem, Honywell, Prime, Dec, whatever and independent of the protocol, BSC, X.25, SNA and later IP. To authenticate a user and printer in foreign country can be interesting and is not possible without very detailed information of user, network(-s), routes, equipment, etc. and of course of the paying organization or department for inside jobs.
I recall the huge uproar when IBM decided to withdraw access to the source. It was called their "Object Code Only" (OCO) policy and users were outraged. I still have some of the coke can wrappers passed out at a users group meeting making fun simultaneously of OCO and New Coke. (From a Google search, found this which references Feb. 8th, 1983 as the date of the OCO announcement.
There was a very active community within the major IBM users groups such as SHARE, sharing modifications to the systems. The best collection at the time was the CBT Mods Tape which was originally assembled by a Systems Programmer at Connecticut Bank and Trust. I guess it doesn't suprise me that it still exists (Thanks Google!) as it was an invaluable tool back when I was still involved with mainframes.
...speaking as a "dinosaur" ex-mainframe coder (rocks back and forth gently in chair)
Another alternative is a PC card to emulate a mainframe. I think these run about $3k.
www.kiyoinc.com/herchard.html has some info.
So pretty much all IP wants to be free, right? And we can't compete on manufacturing. So it has to be a service -- any suggestions?
I am not aware that Tim O'Reilly has actually contributed or written any Open Source Software himself. Of course he's an advocate: He doesn't have to create or debug any code, and then he can release the result on CD's that are bundled with his books (such as "Learning Red Hat Linux", bundled with a copy of Red Hat.) As he exhorts YOU to write code for free, with freedoms for him to distribute it for a price, he is laughing all the way to the bank.
"Anybody who works for free is a slave."
-- Mr. T, on the Howard Stern Show, regarding
the unauthorized use of footage portraying
his character in a comedic fashion in
Best Buy commercials
Anybody who suggests that IBM mainframe software mirrored the open source movement should go back and check the prices on those mainframes and the prices of the service contracts. They weren't cheap, and hardware prices subsidized the paychecks of those software groups, which were relatively few in number. In other words, they could AFFORD to be "open source". That isn't the case today, and lots of business people and naive software developers are going belly-up trying to pursue the unachievable dream. Some will succeed, and they will tout themselves as examples that "the model works." You will never hear from the legions who abandoned their projects, and who never made a dime because they will be modded down as a "Troll" on Slashdot. (Just look at all the criticisms Cmdr Taco got when he open sourced some of his Slashdot code.)
By the way, mainframe manufacturers had a funny trick. They would ship all of their mainframes with all the necessary hardware for both basic (cheaper) and advanced (more expensive) machines. However, the basic machines had the advanced portions disabled. If a client wanted to upgrade, a technician would be sent out with great fanfare and would generally close the door behind him as he worked. He would only really need a screwdriver and a couple of minutes to get the proper cards in place. Keep that door closed! In other words, it's something that the clients could have done themselves, but of course, it was more profitable for the mainframe companies to charge big bucks for the upgrade.
The advent of CrippleWare!
"I pity the fool."
- Mr. T, anywhere and everywhere.
"...does anyone know whether there is a web interface to this system and if so whether it existed before September 12, 1997?"
Here's a 1990 post discussing ISPF access using tn3270 (a 3270 terminal emulator running with tcp/ip transport) via the internet. And this 1996 press release announced Netscape's licensing of IBM's Host On-Demand, a Java-based tn3270 solution that provided 3270 terminal emulation for intranet and Web users and was integrated into Netscape 4.0.
What planet are you on? VMS makes a huge amount of money.
Just look at Intel, they use VMS to fab all their processors, they might be a little irrated to discover cHumPaq killed VMS.
In vacating the injunction Amazon obtained to force Barnes and Noble to eliminate their single-click ordering function, the U.S. Court of Appeals concluded that the district court erred in failing to recognize that one of the references cited by BN - the CompuServe Trend System, which automatically charged purchasers' accounts 50 cents for each stock chart ordered - raised a substantial question of invalidity. The district court dismissed the significance of this system partly on the basis that it "was not a world wide web application," a distinction the U.S. Court of Appeals found irrelevant, noting that Amazon's '1-Click' patent specification explicitly notes that "[o]ne skilled in the art would appreciate that the single-action ordering techniques can be used in various environments other than the Internet."
All the interesting problems will have been solved *in that area* and so the hackers will move on to new areas.
With all due respect, I think you are seriously underestimating something--maybe the nature of hackers, maybe the nature of problems--if you believe that it is possible to solve "all the interesting problems" in any field of human endevour whatsoever.
For example, if you look at any ancient "problem space" you will find people still devoting their lives attacking problems that they find interesting in the true hackerly spirit. Fire? Lots of active research, both professional and amature. Ditto agriculture. What about dealing with the other gender? Animal husbandry / wildlife management? Or just looking at the stars? I personally know serveral people who are still trying to get to the bottom of knots! If anything, the number of interesting problems in an area goes up with time.
Can you name even one area where all the interesting problems have been solved--keeping in mind that it only has to be interesting to the hackers that are working on it, even if 99.99% of humanity thinks it's as dull as dirt (yet another subject that we haven't come close to exhausting, even though it's as old as the hills)?
-- MarkusQ
These guys also pay for 24x7 support - lots of cash. HPaq suddenly found that they had a little gold mine.
See my journal, I write things there