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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.
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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
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!!!!
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.
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.
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!
"..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!
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
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.
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?
The CB App. What's your 20?
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?
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.
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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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?
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"I could walk inside it."
;)
Ahhhh! So YOU were the bug.
-m
#
# Modus Ponens
#
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.
(I especially like the Willow Rosenberg quote).
I do not agreee with this at all!
Alternatives to COBOL have existed since the 60's. PL/I is an excellent alternative. It supports literally everything that is any good in COBOL and gets rid of most of the COBOL crapola. The biggest reasons people have not switched is probably because they don't know any better and go with the idea that if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
As to reltaional databases, well - they are NOT a good alternative for many tasks that run quite well in the mainframes. The fundamental design objective of a relational data base is to expose any and all data to applications. In fact, this is diametrically opposed to what we really need.
Most data ends up archived at some point and from that point on we need read only access. This is not what relational database systems try to accomplish.
Another thing the wanna be replacement computers do not have is the Partition Dataset. We probably can build such a beast into Linux using loopback mounts or a variation thereof. But it is going to take a lot of work for reasons I'll describe next.
A PDS is tied to a set of applications and to a group of users. When you do a loopback mount of a file the system exposes the contents of the file to every user and application in the system. Thus every file in the directory becomes subject to tampering, either inadvertent or deliberate.
Meanwhile the contents of the PDS can be relied upon in much the same was as the contents of a tarball can be relied apon.
What this all boils down to is that the mainframe provides capabilities that are not found in alternative systems.
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.
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:
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?
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.
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.