Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
probably quite a bit... maybe a few ten thousand dollars? remember people are still using these beasts...
In IBM land the generations go like this:
S/360 series.. the OG of the mainframe world, these are what you think of when you think of government and scientific computers of the 60's. They are notable because they are the first "modular" computers, meaning they weren't custom made 1-off jobs, but you could still upgrade the proccessing and i/o power as you need and afford it.
S/370's replaced the s/360's and were used up thru the late 70's 80's and still a few operate into the 90's. At work we use s/370 era hardware and disks. You know tape reels, 200 meg 3480 18-track tape drives, IBM "infowindow" and 3178c terminals, and stuff. These things were built like tanks and have been running practicly 24/7 for 15-20 years.
S/390's are the modern versions, which is what we use for the actual computer power... All modern mainframes from IBM are these.
SO... you could probably get one fairly cheap as far as IBM mainframes go, but good luck finding parts and your going to need to a power supply (from the power company) on the same level as a small apartment building. Oh, don't forget the several thousand dollars a months for the OS's and such, but if you got a s/370 or later you can run linux on it!!! (still have to run a IBM OS though to run the linux OS).
Pretty expensive for the same proccessing power of a 486 PC. Put I/O is still unparralelled for the modern stuff .
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.
why not think about an old iSeries (AS/400)? They go for 1000$+ on ebay, are relatively modern, the manuals are on the web and they can do email/webserving (i think the more recent ones run linux, too). just be sure to get a risc model(preferably with the os V5Rx or at least V4Rx), and not one of the old grey cisc-"i can't do anything anymore"-models...
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.
Rather than increase your electricity bill further, you could try a 370 emulator, I know there are commercial ones about, but a quick google revealed the one below.
http://www.conmicro.cx/hercules/
Stu
Not necessarily; it all depends how old the machine is. I remember a time (back when the Earth was newly-cooled, and Real Programmers got their assembly-coding done while trying not to get eaten by dinosaurs...) a shop I worked at decommissioned a Burroughs B3700.
The contractors were only too happy to take it away, as there was enough 3/4 inch-thick silver cable under the floor to fill a small truck. I'm pretty sure they would not have lost money on that operation.
Ya, but the iseries aren't realy mainframes. Their midrange servers...
There realy is a big difference. A server is designed for serving other computers, providing services and small to large files... a mainframe is a standalone thing, maybe with a couple supporting PC's to aid in network functions and stuff like that.
Mainframes are dinasours. Tiny brains, big bodies. You have the central housing for the cpu, but then each device has a disk controller that controls and operates each peice of equipment...
Think of it like a video card, but instead of crunching 3-d stuff it's crunching I/O, each device (the controller for a bank of tape drives, or disks) operates itself and the central computer just tells the bits were to go, it stays out of the loop as much as possible.
A example would be:
This 3,000,000 phone numbers get added to existing records and sorted to the zip code, and sent to this disk volume, then gets divided by state, then each state volume gets backed up into tape drives for backups... Then a week later a client wants at least 4000 records from wisconson that represent people who are male, make over 30,000 dollars and are bow hunters. You find 1200, but then they want more so you add some zip codes searches from surround communities and find enough records. They pay for the records and then you zip the volumes into a single file print out a hardcopy of it's contents and it gets ftp'ed to the client's print company for mass mail flyers.
Don't need much cpu power for those jobs, but you need tremendous thrurougput to do this and 8 other jobs like that at the same time. Mostly it's shuffling data around and appending records.
That is the world of mainframes...
Even the brand new s/390's (t-rex stuff) getting stomped on in terms of proccessing power compared to the power4 servers....
Supercomputers on the other hand can do tremendous amounts of I/O AND have lots of proccessing power. so they can do complex mathmatics with large amounts of data on a tremendious speed. Both a high-end server and a mainframe would choke on that.
So that's the difference between a high-end server(lots of cpu power), a mainframe(lots of I/O power), and a supercomputer(mega lots of both).
It has nothing to do with confidence in open source. My point is that hacking will eventually stop being fun in many areas that are now the heartland of the open source movement. All the interesting problems will have been solved *in that area* and so the hackers will move on to new areas.
Meanwhile, you have only to look at the way that folks like Red Hat are trying to gain increasing control over their users to see the commercial dynamics that I'm talking about. RH as a commercial business isn't that different from a proprietary software company -- you should have seen Robert Lefkowitz (r0ml)'s talk at OScon, where he compared Red Hat's P&L to Borland's -- and you could see that from a financial pov they were nearly identical, except that what Borland called "licenses", Red Hat called "subscriptions." Leading r0ml to a wonderful slide called "Sharia Compliant Mortgages", which showed some of the creative accounting used in Islamic countries to get around the Islamic law prohibition on charging interest.
These things are always more complex than they appear. No simple answers. But that's what makes it fun.
Open source is great, but the choice between open and proprietary is not going to end up with an either-or solution.
Tim O'Reilly @ O'Reilly Media, Inc. 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472 http://www.oreilly.com
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.
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