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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."
I'm sure many minis and possibly fewer mainframes are sitting in storage and waiting for a trip to the dump. The companies waiting to dispose of these monsters would probably love for you to haul it away, rather than them discarding it and having to pay the tipping fees.
:)
I could have gotten my hands on an old MicroVAX in this manner, but when I figured out the performance (or lack thereof) I would be getting, the lack of any real support resources when/if the thing broke, and most importantly -- the estimated electricity usage -- I smiled and declined.
It _would_ have been cool, though.
About 1 metric ton, fridge size, 380V AC and big ass air conditionning.
If you're lucky enough to get an s390 you can run debian, otherwise...welcome cobol, jcl, batch, ebcdic and perhaps interactive mode...
As for price, I dunno.
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.
A generalisation: some machines were engineered that way, more commonly as LSI came in during the 1980's. But the customers weren't entirely ignorant about it: it wasn't primarily a technical issue, but a matter of contracts and resourses - factors that members of /.'s army of part-time boy programmers may eventually understand when they've had to earn their living in the trade for a few years.
Sure - if they had their own engineering organisation, trained to maintain the machines they used, and were willing to take full responsibility for any and all unanticipated consequences of what they did. You needed to be a pretty big organisation with pretty unusual requirements for that to be worthwhile.The vendors charged what they reckoned the market would bear. Big customers did better than small ones. Another aspect of the mainframe era that is being repeated today - I'm sure I don't have to give any clues about the particular platforms and products involved.
Dr Hu - who worked with mainframes as recently as the early 1990s.
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