IBM's Mainframe Dinosaur Turns 40

theodp writes "According to an SFGate.com article, PCs were supposed to kill off the mainframe, but Big Blue's big boxes are still crunching numbers, posting sales of $4.2 billion in 2003. First unveiled on April 7, 1964, the IBM mainframe computer celebrates its 40th birthday this week with a sold-out party at the Computer History Museum." The SFGate article also reveals: "Doug Balog, an IBM vice president, noted that 70 percent of the world's data are still housed in mainframe computers."

Comments

Consequently...

[bc90021]

COBOL is still in wide use. It is even being used with .NET, just to give you some idea of how widespread it is.

They'll be around forever

[agslashdot]

At my first startup, one of my first multipeople multiyear Java projects was a mainframe screen scraper ( TN3270 using AWT - example ). I was fresh out of college & totally unaware that mainframes still ruled the planet. Those two years & the huge revenues it brought led the startup to be acquired and made a lot of people really rich ( minus moi, ofcourse :(
Lots of money to be made in desktop-mainframe connectivity.

PC based systems aren't up to the task.

[Shivetya]

Mainframes and Minis will be around a long time. To get PC based systems up to their level of reliability, ease of use, and maintainability would turn the PC based system into a MINI.

I have 75 iSeries (As/400) that I oversee. You want to know how much time I spend per week checking up on them? Only an hour or so. I receive reports from the machines when they have problems. If one has a fault it is usually hardware and rarely does the downtime pass a few hours.

Meanwhile the network group (read : uses PC based technologies) is always fixing something and has 5 people dedicated to it compared to two for the iSeries boxes. That doesn't count the PC-support group which supports desktops...

We have 3 mainframes as well, some of the code from these machines has been in use since the early 70s. Some of the code migrated to the iSeries with little but header changes.

But the best, the iSeries has been on 64-bit PowerPCs natively for 10+ years. Didn't have to recompile or change 99% of our code to do it. How long has the PC base world been struggling to get there?

Flying Mainframes

[computechnica]

The most widely used flying command and control platform is the AWACS designed by IBM and Boeing back in the 70s. The USAF,NATO,JDF, and saudi's are all based on the same dual IBM 360 platform (named 4-pi). These mainframes all have been upgraded in memory and converted from tape drives to hard drives. We still develope the software in JOVIAL and assembler.Info

Mainframe older than that

[fm6]

This is the 40th anniversary of a mainframe: the System 360. The 360 was a darned important machine (amongst other things, it was the first computer with a byte-addressible memory), but it was hardly the very first mainframe. True computers had been around for about 25 years -- and technically speaking, all computers were mainframes before integrated circuitry made minicomputers and microcomputer feasible.

Re:Mainframe vs. Supercomputer

[bennomatic]

There are a handful of differences, though many of the definitions overlap.

The simplest way to think of these two classifications is that
- "Supercomputer" refers to processing speed and is defined differently in different contexts (i.e. Apple calling its G4 400 a supercomputer because of an outdated US Customs document).
- "Mainframe" refers to large systems that many users are going to use at the same time, typically via dumb terminal interfaces. Most importantly, mainframes have IO architectures which blow any desktop/workstation out of the water. A good mainframe can be talking to 500 terminals while printing 1000 different bank statements to 100 different high-speed line printers without even breaking a sweat.

Hope this helps. Any other fun definitions to add?

Re:Mainframe vs. Supercomputer

[Alien Being]

Mainframes:
General purpose machine.
Tons of IO bandwidth.
Substantial processing power.
Highly redundant and fault tolerant.
Flexible and scalable architecture.
Their OSes are very secure and support thousands of users.

Supercomputer:
Specialized scientific machine.
Tons of memory and/or interprocessor bandwidth.
Loads of processing power, especially vectors.
IO speed may not be important.
Redundancy and fault tolerance not as critical as with mainframe.
Architectures tend to change more frequently.
OSes not geared for business use.

Windows Terminal Services is a joke

[green pizza]

Take a good look at the SunRay terminals that Sun is offering. Rather than hack and patch Windows, they simply made a few modifications to X, most of the client-server tech was already in place.

Thin Client Windows has been a nightmare, and it's only getting worse. One of the original incarnations, WinDD hosted by a Tektronix-modified version of Windows NT 3.5, wasn't so bad... Windows was simpler back then. But all of the "ease of use" and "zero administration" crap Microsoft and Citrix have built up since then has made thin client Windows a miserable beast to deal with. I know many administrators who swear a building full of plain PCs and a good Norton Ghost setup is easier to maintain.

Re:DATUM not data

[DunbarTheInept]

In English it's neither plural nor singular. Data is a mass noun - like "water" or "air" - you don't count how many of them you have without specifying a container or a measurement of some sort. Just like it is nonsense to say "I have 3 airs here", but you could say "I have 3 bottles of (or litres of, or cubic feet of, or kilograms of...) air here. It's nonsense to say "I have 3 data here." That doesn't mean anything. Now, "3 Bytes of (or pages of, or databases of, or integers of, or strings of, or columns of...) data, now that makes sense. The singular or plural designation goes on the measurement noun, not on the mass noun.

Re:Because PCs was wrong

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

if you consider a browser a dumb terminal

Now things may have changes since when I was a lad. But when I worked at IBM many years ago we used 3278 terminals. They practically are web browsers, invented decades before Mosaic. The form based approach 3278s use is much more powerful than the character-at-a-time nonsense like vt100 and its successors. Once great advantage is that things like text editors were still quite usable when the mainframe was being hammered.

Re:Linux not mentioned?

[PCM2]

Note that quote references the number of mainframes IBM is selling. Most of the mainframes currently in use were sold years and years ago.

That said, I've been talking to IBM about Linux on the mainframe recently and while I don't have an actual figure handy, I wouldn't be surprised if the number your source cited were true, and in fact there may be even more movement in the Linux-on-mainframe area than that figure suggests.

IBM is marketing Linux on the mainframe primarily to existing mainframe customers who want to further leverage their investments there. Remember that mainframes tend to be very modular and upgradeable ... you need not replace the thing to see performance gains or new functionality. You can just buy some new parts.

So IBM is selling a version of Linux that will run under zVM, its mainframe virtualization technology, as well as hardware modules that are basically PowerPC G5 units you can add to the base hardware for the explicit purpose of running Linux. (I don't think you necessarily need the add-on modules to run Linux, I just know that they're available.)

This doesn't really have any benefit at all if you're running a compute cluster or any other application where the Linux boxes are running at high utilization all the time. The main purpose for this is consolidation of lightweight servers. Let's say you have a farm of a hundred Linux Web servers that mostly sit around idle, and the heaviest lifting they need to do is to hand off transactions for processing in the database on the zSeries mainframe. IBM suggests that you instead roll all those servers into virtual machines on the mainframe itself.

Note that we're usually talking about a mainframe that's already in production use, here. You don't need to wipe your mainframe and start over with Linux. You can run Linux instances and z/OS instances at the same time. You gain the following advantages:

1. You can now use the same staff to maintain those Linux "boxes" that you were already using to maintain the mainframe
2. VM makes it pretty easy to provision new virtual servers as needed, and keep their configurations consistent
3. You get the benefit of increased I/O -- the Linux instances think they're communicating over TCP/IP to some remote database, but really all the I/O happens using the in-memory channels on the mainframe

Are these advantages compelling enough to make a lot of companies run out and spend the money on a mainframe? Probably not, especially with today's economy so focused on short-term gains instead of long-term ROI. But if you've already spent the money it could be pretty attractive.

From my understanding, IBM doesn't really have a whole horde of customers yet, but I bet a lot of mainframe customers are evaluating the option.

More information on this, as well as mainframe topics in general, in last week's InfoWorld: here, here, and the full PDF special report on mainframes here.

Re:IBM management said that did they?

[Dirtside]

I don't know about that. There's quite a lot of big old mainframes running weather tracking and analysis software, for example. The USGS, I believe, has a number of mainframes that collect several terabytes of weather data per day... and they keep all of it. Forever.

There are quite a lot of such obscure applications out there (especially in the earth and space sciences) that gather titanic amounts of data. Even if Google cached all five billion web pages, and each web page was a megabyte (which is probably way overestimating), that's 10 petabytes of data (5 petabytes each for the pages and the cache). Now think about the thousands of mass-data-collecting computers there are out there, that (between them) archive more data than that every day.

Needed: CICS for modern computers

[Animats]

One of IBM's more enduring products, even though they keep trying to get rid of it, is CICS. CICS, the "customer information control system" is 35 years old this year.

CICS is a neat idea that deserves a new look. It's a "transaction processing OS". Think of it as an OS whose purpose in life is to run CGI programs efficiently. In its simplest form, each incoming transaction starts up a new program which reads the transaaction, connects to the database, processes the transaction, and exits, typically within a fraction of a second. The operating system is optimized for starting and running those transactions.

CGI processing under Linux is inefficient, and hacks like mod_perl are needed so that a new process isn't created for each transaction. One could do better. Transaction programs under CICS are started, run up to the point that they need input, and stopped. When a transaction comes in, a copy of the stopped transaction program is forked off, used to run the transaction, and terminated. So there's no way for data to leak between transactions. All transaction programs run in a jail, allowed to talk only to the database and to reply to their incoming message.

With better OS support for transactions, web servers could have a cleaner, faster interface for their transactions.