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IBM's Mainframe Dinosaur Turns 40

Posted by simoniker on from the not-so-purple dept.

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."

2 of 384 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Mainframe vs. Supercomputer by Alien+Being · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Needed: CICS for modern computers by Animats · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.