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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."
Skynet wont be able to take over with just a bunch o' desktops...
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. -- Larry Wall
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.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
...and they tend to deal with tape media a whole lot better/faster too
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Thank god IBM's management are less susceptible to the '70% of statistics are made up on the spot' rule that other managers aren't....
Mainframes are usually more robust, have a more developed architectures and in general are designed around a more stringent set of standards. Most mainframes have 24/7 use in mind. A friend of mine at NORAD talked about a PDP-11 with a 6 year uptime. Granted a PDP isn't a mainframe but those machines are architected with longevity in mind
Thalasar
While the overall structure of mainframes (OS, programming languages, etc.) have not changed much over the last 40 years, the actual guts of these computers have actually improved with the times (disk, computing capacity, etc.). Mainframes are much more suited for data warehouse and batch process applications then today's more "sexy" multi-tier architectures. The only downside to mainframe computing would be cost.
I personally don't think mainframes will be gone... ever.
COBOL is still in wide use. It is even being used with .NET, just to give you some idea of how widespread it is.
libertarianswag.com
That's because you are the one that is wrong. Any and every dictionary I've ever seen has data as the plural of datum. Maybe no one is paying attention to you because they're tired of explaining it to YOU.
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
Not only are they still around, the world is moving back towards a mainframe-ish approach.. Hell, a webserver is a mainframe-ish approach if you consider a browser a dumb terminal (which I do).
Mainframe + dumb terminals:
Code executes in one place (one machine to maintain from a software viewpoint). Code 'lives' with the data.
Collaboration/groupwork/etc is a no-brainer. "Brenda bring up invoice #43223 and blah blah blah".
Software is protected from users (for the most part).
PCs + Fat/thin Clients:
Code excutes all over. You wind up with versioning/dependency hell. It's a bitch to administrate. Just when you think everythings good, some jackass installs a swimming fish screensaver and you're back to level 0.
Data winds up in multiple, disjointed, locations. Bleh..
Where I work we installed, and still support (and will for a decade past the official HP EOL date) HP 9000 series mainframes. I mainly deal with moving that stuff to the PC world, and I can tell you, lifes a whole lot simpler when you dont have to worry about what version of the OS, etc, etc, etc is running on the client machines..
We're looking hard at Windows Terminal Services - essentially a modern day mainframe implementation, complete with GUI. Or we could go multiple X sessions, but our customers aren't to thrilled with the idea of *nix..
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Data is the singular. DATUM IS THE PLURAL
:)
Merriam-Webster begs to differ: Etymology: Latin, plural of datum
Although I don't think I've heard many people ever talk about datum either... maybe because it's always always plural. When was the last time you had only one piece of datum?
Place sig here.
Maybe you should have looked it up at some point over the last few decades. Here is an extract from Wikipedia:
A datum is a statement accepted at face value. Data is the plural of datum. A large class of practically important statements are measurements or observations of a variable. Such statements may comprise numbers, words, or images.
The word data is the plural of Latin datum, neuter past participle of dare, "to give", hence "something given". The past participle of "to give" has been used for millennia, in the sense of a statement accepted at face value; one of the works of Euclid, circa 300 BC, was the Dedomena (in Latin, Data). In discussions of problems in geometry, mathematics, engineering, and so on, the terms givens and data are used interchangeably. Such usage is the origin of data as a concept in computer science: data are numbers, words, images, etc., accepted as they stand.
Bah!
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.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
The other 30% is porn and cookies.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
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.
This claims that as of the end of 2002, 15% of the mainframes IBM was selling would be running Linux.
Has that number dropped off?
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?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I guess this depends on how you define "data". The Economist recently described a Berkeley report that 3.5 to 5.5 *Exabytes* of data were produced in 2002. If you believe the unlikely proposition that Blue Glue is holding 70% of that new data, then you have to wonder why IBM only made $4.2B in selling mainframes to store and process that data.
mainframe n. An obsolete device still used by thousands of obsolete companies serving billions of obsolete customers and making huge obsolete profits for their obsolete shareholders. And this year's run twice as fast as last year's.
- The Devil's IT Dictionary
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
I used to hate the SPF/PDF interface, but after a decade of being forced to use (by employer) with the utter shit that is MS Windows, it's now just fond memories of something that WORKED. also, REXX did (and still does) rock.
and long after no one cares who billgates was, there will still be Big Blue Iron.
oh yeah, BSD Lives!
Can anyone explain the difference between a mainframe and a supercomputer?
"..noted that 70 percent of the world's data are still housed in mainframe computers."
They obviously haven't seen my pron collection!
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
Science is the Real TRUTH!
4.2 billion dollars? Did they only sell 6 last year? ;)
HitScan
The IBM mainframe computer celebrates its 40th birthday this week with a sold-out party at the Computer History Museum
Yeah, I'll bet that's going to be a real barn burner
... Thats umpossible!
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.
I saw my first computer in 1966 - a IBM 360/44 ( a mod 40 without MVCL instruction). FORTRAN was the language of choice. I knew where my career was headed. Here I am almost 40 years later.
Tired of computing and hoping for a less-stressful retirement.
In Woodland Hills, CA, there is a mainframe that contains all the medical records of every event that has ever taken place in the state. (I used to work IT there, and I've seen it...farkin' impressive piece of machinery.)
They TRIED to convert it to a more conventional system, but they couldn't, due to the fact that no database on earth could handle the sheer number of records.
Impressive, no?
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.
Why PCs Crash, and Mainframes Don't
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Just don't light a cigar. You might trigger the halon.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
The "problem" with mainframes is not so much that they are old, but that most of the applications didn't use relational databases. If the applications used relational databases, then one could much more easily slowly replace COBOL applications with a more pleasant language of implementation in piecemeal.
Mainframes are Turing Complete, so that any software can be made to run on them if the tools are built. Thus, things like limited-length file names can be transitioned to longer names in a way similar to how Windows allowed one to move to long file names. A mainframe could make an ideal web server because of its security and multi-processing capabilities. If this is the case, then why is it not done often?
Companies seem to have trouble doing this because of data sharing issues. They must keep using the old data while the conversion takes place to newer conventions. But this would mean having Java and PHP apps accessing data stored in the likes of IMS (navigational) databases. But this would mean one had to keep using IMS even after the conversion. (There are IMS-to-relational translation techniques, but they are hokey for the most part and it is tough to get decent normalization because of the different philosophies.)
Thus, the "problem" with mainframes is not the hardware, but the database conversion. The live data cannot easily be in two kinds of databases at once.
Table-ized A.I.
AS400 .NE. mainframe. System 390 .EQ. mainframe.
He never said AS/400 ws a mainframe. He talked about both mainframes and minicomputers. In fact, if you look at his post again, he said his business has 75 AS/400s and 3 mainframes.
And for those that don't already know this: even a big Unix server is still a Microcomputer. Takes more fault tolerance and funky system architecture than what a Sun has to be called a Mini.
Which brings up the question: is an HP/Tandam NonStop Himalaya a mini or a mainframe?
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.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
posting sales of $4.2 billion
So, IBM sold three mainframes. What's the big deal, here?
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
(I especially like the Willow Rosenberg quote).
I guess I better pull out my book of FORTRAN for Dummies.
Wait. Any FORTRAN book is FORTRAN for dummies
~mingust
Once they're gone, they'll be back. From personal experience, I've seen that centralized systems always work better than multiple PCs spread all over the place in terms of reliability. So, I don't think you'll see mainframes go away that quickly AND you'll eventually see them come back. There's just too many benefits, the main one being efficient use of power. I expect that what we'll wind up seeing in the future is a "centralized" system where the OS and the applications and the data are all one entity and the entire network is one big computer.
Think about it... Back when people used to actually, literally wire programs into old time computers... all that stuff still happens in that box on by your feet or on your desk. Thin abuout how many levels and how much duplication in task there is in a PC:
You have the microcode at the processor level which is really an analog to programs. But they aren't programs for you, the user. They are programs for the CPU's infrastructure. Then the RAM... It' all over the freakin' place. It's in the CPU, on the motherboard in various places, in your DIMMs, your video card, many periphs, etc... Then you've got the BIOS which is like higher level software compared to the microcode. It's a st of single purpose applications again. But not for you... it's for your hardware. And it interfaces with the OS at some point which (in many cases these days) takes over for the BIOS adding yet another layer of software.
This time, the software that the OS is, is partially for you and partially for your hardware. If you are strictly speaking kernel-wise, then it's pretty much a bridge between user space apps (shell) and the machine. Then you have your final layer of applications which ARE for you. But will it end there? No... you've got the network protocol stacks. This is the top layer of the multilayered cake that leads to the network.
But think about it. It's ALL THE SAME THING. Over and over again at different levels with slightly different purposes. So... at some point in time, all these PCs are going to be embedded devices, or wearables, or implants or entities providing even more layers. But when you peel the onion, you're still going to see THE SAME THINGS. Over and over and over again. And on top of all of that, you are going to see the shifts back and forth from centralized to de-centralized and back again. It's part of some cosmic imperative because if you think even eeper you see it mimicked in politics, communications technology (think old time TV vs. satellite vs. over the air digital vs. WLAN based PVRs), and even the automobile vs. mass transportation.
It's some kind of cosmic rhythm that pulses through the millennia like an ethereal rave...
Un-news
should read:
Forget the whales - save the babies.
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.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
DATA
data ( P ) Pronunciation Key (dt, dt, dat)
pl.n. (used with a sing. or pl. verb)
Factual information, especially information organized for analysis or used to reason or make decisions.
Computer Science. Numerical or other information represented in a form suitable for processing by computer.
Values derived from scientific experiments.
Plural of datum.
[Latin, pl. of datum. See datum.]
Usage Note: The word data is the plural of Latin datum, "something given," but it is not always treated as a plural noun in English. The plural usage is still common, as this headline from the New York Times attests: "Data Are Elusive on the Homeless." Sometimes scientists think of data as plural, as in These data do not support the conclusions. But more often scientists and researchers think of data as a singular mass entity like information, and most people now follow this in general usage. Sixty percent of the Usage Panel accepts the use of data with a singular verb and pronoun in the sentence Once the data is in, we can begin to analyze it. A still larger number, 77 percent, accepts the sentence We have very little data on the efficacy of such programs, where the quantifier very little, which is not used with similar plural nouns such as facts and results, implies that data here is indeed singular.
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:
System/370s don't come just as a chunk of hardware. They're more like a jet airliner. They come with support contracts and support personell. And the software that runs on them isn't 'retail' and you can't just nab a copy off a warez site.
Not implying anything about what you'd do with a s370, but it's not likely even if you found the hardware on a loading dock somewhere and got it for salvage price, that you'd ever be able to run anything on it.
Do you have three phase power?
---
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?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
With the proper operating system, and a few add-on cards, a modern server PC could easily handle hundreds of serial printers (which I am assuming you mean. Parallel same difference.)
As far as tapes, well, you don't normally mount tapes like the old days with reel to reel spindles. Those things weren't nearly as fast as a modern DLT or AIT system. A modern server PC can easily handle a handful of drives operated with very large robotic library systems. You don't need "operaters" anymore, man.
I do believe that my desktop has more THROUGHput then a 1985 mainframe, by far.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
With regards to the printers: 128 at the moment via local connections (though 127 sharing 12Mbps of bandwidth, if you include networked postscript printers, effectively unlimited) Terminals: serial (atm, just 2, though I have a couple of multi-port pci serial cables), network(effectively unlimited, and already has netbooted machines (sparcs and x86)), console(could go two console), or combination? Given that it doesn't have tapes, no.
Computers today could do it. It's just a matter of having the extra parts to handle it. Of course most mainframes are going to beat the crap out of single channel scsi raid, 2 64-bit pci busses, etc for IO. Though compared to this thing's processors, the word creamed comes to mind for cpu-intensive tasks.
Not that I disagree about the fast cpu (which is likely unable to even pull the memory speeds reqired.) Comparitively, a RS/6000 (workstations & servers) from 1997 has 4 256-bit memory paths of PC50, which puts it at the equivelent of a PC200 DIMM, and if they interlaced the banks themselves (of which I am not sure, and doubt) it would be equivelent of a PC800 DIMM, only dual-channel DDR400 can match that, from a 7 year old machine.
I did some work for a large payroll company, and this was the platform IBM sold them for running mission critical payroll processing for its thousands of customers.
This isn't about legacy application as much as it is about consolidating clustered applications into an easier to manage platform. Believe it or not, you can still do state-of-the-art software development despite the physical housing being a mainframe.
We did all the software development on the PC. The mainframe was simply the deployment destination. This is one advantage of the J2EE architecture. This also ruled out .NET, as Windows didn't offer the stability that Linux offered on the mainframe. However, we did happen to use Windows on the PCs in order to be able to use Rational Rose. Barring Rose, which isn't needed in deployment, our development architecture was completely compatible with Linux.
From a J2EE perspective, this eliminated the need to manage clusters in operation, as well as to develop for them. Clustering, despite its raves in the news, has a lot of production related issues that the mainframe solves. This is part of IBM's marketing pitch.
Open Standards Portal
Yes - this is certainly true - you can restrict access. However the act of doing said restriction is subject to errors.
A tape with the write enable ring / switch pulled off cannot be modified because the hardware it is mounted on checks for this. In a database with everything on-line a simple keystroke error defeats what you wish to accomplish.
Simply put - if I take my data off line then it does not matter how insecure the system is - you cannot access it.
The gist of what I tried to comment on is the value in a Partition Data Set concept. Here is a for instance. Apache has a lot of components. If Linux ran a PDS then we could simply put all of apache in one PDS, mount it exclusively for the server in question and as for the websites - set each of these also in their own PDS and there really IS no security issue any more. To switch back and forth between a couple versions of apache would be no more difficult than flipping a switch so to speak.
The install process is eliminated with the PDS.
Managment of vast volumes of data becomes really easy.
Linux and Unix users invented the tar ball and they live and die by the wonderful packaging capabilities a tar ball provides.
In a mainframe - the PDS does the tar ball packaging with live applications. We really need this in Linux!
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.
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...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Even smaller IBM servers (like AS/400) have built in UPS. So unplugging for a short period of time won't hurt it.
Besides you can find even PC servers with redundant, hot pluggable power supplies. In mainframe every piece of hardware is hotpluggable including processors.
Ways Ive seen an IBM mainframe fail:
- I'll just IPL (reboot) the test partition to test out some changes Ive made. Opps, wrong partition.
- I'm on this test partition with this new OS ready for testing. Hmm this security database copy tool appears to corrupt the database. I'll take diagnostics and send the results off to IBM. Oops Ive just copied onto the live production database and corrupted it, and now everything is failing security checks. I cant switch to the backup database cos I cant work out which security message is the one for the database switch.
- I'm a dumb bulding subcontractor, I'm in the basement drilling into walls, but I dont want to electrocute myself, so I'll go and throw that big switch with the red mnessages over there.
- I'm an even dumber contractor, some idiot has thrown the main 3 phase power switch and walked off, so I'll just throw it back again. BANG!!
- The power has been rather unreliable of late, and the UPS has been continually taking short 5 minute loads whilst the generators kick in. Now the power has gone for the 10th time this weekend, and the UPS has run dry, and the generator cant kick in in time.
It is possible to bring a mainframe down, but it requires stupidity, superuser proviledges, access to the poser supply, or a large axe.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
It might be true he could become an expert in two weeks, I dont know the original poster, he might have an extraordinary talent for it, it's just a sign of a lack of social skills to express it that way in a job interview.
I know it took me about a year to become as good as some of the veterans at coding for large business machines at the company where I work, and I was proficient in a wide variety of different programming languages before I applied there.