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

If it aint broke.....

[BWJones]

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.

Well, there is a reason you still see COBOL jobs being posted from time to time. The IBM mainframe architecture was well designed and well implemented and to quote an oft used phrase: "if it aint broke, don't fix it".

Of course they have made some improvements over the years, but these things are going to have a mighty impressive return on investment over the course of their lifetimes. Much more so than your average desktop PC which (if your running Windows) needs (is required) to be replaced every couple of years or so.

biased quote?

[dj245]

"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."

Is it just me or is that a bit of a biased quote? Its kind of like Steve Jobs saying that "Apples are the fastest computer on the face of the planet", or Bill Gates saying that "Windows is the most secure OS in the world". These statements may or may not be true. Studies may be done to determine the validity of the claims, but I would argue that ultimately most of the world's data is tied up in Girls Gone Wild DVD's. The point is that the makers of the claims have a bit of a personal stake in the claim, making them slightly more apt to being taken with the obligatory salty grain.

Re:Mainframe vs. Supercomputer

[green pizza]

If the speed is measured in gigaflops, or it looks fancy and new, it's a supercomputer. If it can interface with teletypes, chain printers, reel to reel tape drives, or punchcard readers, it's a mainframe...
Mainframes are always huge, and are all about reliability. They run great, because the current ones were designed in the 1970s, and have had nothing but bug fixes since then.

A modern IBM S/390 zSeries mainframe may have an overall design from the 1970s, but its individual components (CPUs, I/O controllers, etc), as well as the thruput of the busses is very modern. A recent mainframe could easily benchmark in the multiple gigaflops range of raw performance, but that isn't the point. Mainframes are all about moving important data reliably (and, if possible, fairly fast). A credit card company isn't going to trust a Cray and a scientist isn't going to do his simulations in COBOL on an IBM S/390.

Re:COBOL

[John Courtland]

Not only that but, sure, you don't have to be brilliant to use COBOL.... but you do to use MVS, JCL, JSAM, VSAM and all that other prehistoric bullshit without missing a beat. Good luck keeping up with business when every single command has spacing requirements, the interface is just a virtual punchcard and the output is as cryptic as the Rosetta Stone, when all you have is some wanna-be book and experience in non-similar languages. Don't get me wrong, I respect the whole argument that knowing the computer well enough, any language is a snap to learn, but that other garbage just is so hard to get a tight, fluent grasp on quickly that I understand the 5 yr requirement.

Re:COBOL

[JohnQPublic]

I told them that with two weeks and a good book, I could be as fluent in COBOL as any of their engineers, but that wasn't good enough.

You may think wthat's what you told them. What you really told them was:

1. You were so full of yourself that you truly believed you could become a guru in nothing flat.
2. You thought they were a bunch or morons.
3. You didn't want their respect, let alone their job.

Re:COBOL

[rve]

Did you really tell that job interviewer that you needed two weeks and a good book to develop the skills he got in perhaps a decade or two?

While IBM has the majority of the mainframe market

[Richard Steiner]

not all of the mainframes in current use (or which are currently being marketed) are from IBM, or are even based on IBM's mainframe architecture.

At least two of the top four airlines in the US are still heavily using Unisys mainframes, for example. Those are based on the Sperry UNIVAC 1100-series boxes of the 1960's and 70's (a 36-bit architecture which is word-addressible, not byte-addressible) and an OS called OS2200 (or OS 2200), and many of them are still running applications software that was originally designed and written during that era (though it is constantly being modified in-house, of course).

As others here have said, mainframes are simply not the old coal-fired boxes that they are sometimes portrayed to be, certainly not on the hardware side of things. What they really are is a centralized server whose design is specialized around very high levels of reliability/recoverability and high levels of data throughput combined with the ability to serve applications to thousands of users with very low levels of system and communications overhead for each user action.

That makes them exceedingly efficient at what they do, not just large and expensive. :-)

Also, while most of them tend to have some "stone age" elements on the applications software side, keep in mind that most of the older software tends to be found at the API level, not in the core of the OSes which support that API.

While application code on those boxes might be very old indeed, or at least based on very old software interfaces, the hardware and software platforms which form the guts of those mainframe boxes have been moving forward over the past few decades just as quickly in many areas as they have been in the desktop and smaller server world.

Part of the reason that such systems still exist is certainly tied to various economic factors like the difficulty of porting applications and such (when one has several million lines of code which is tightly tied to one's business rules, one doesn't rewrite that software arbitrarily).

However, some companies still use mainframes for another reason: they have a few applications which simply cannot fail if the company is to operate effectively. In some cases, even a small outage can cause cascading effects thorughout the company and cost the company millions of dollars. Or more.

My own experience is with major airlines, and they are one of the largest users of such systems in key areas, but financial entities such as NASDAQ have been using similar large systems for years because they need a very high level of reliability and recoverability.

I really think it's a shame that more people are not exposed to these types of systems in college so they can get some sense of what those machines are actually designed for (and what the hardware and software in those boxes is actually capable of).

While Unix, Windows, and Mac systems are ubiquitous these days, they simply do not define all existing computing architectures by themselves, nor can they effectively or efficiently handle all types of computing tasks. Not yet, anyway...