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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.
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.
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.
"..noted that 70 percent of the world's data are still housed in mainframe computers."
They obviously haven't seen my pron collection!
While Linux has advanced in many places, most people who were interested in it on mainframes quickly realized that it didn't fit so good there.
Major differences were required in the kernel to support a scalable Linux at that level which meant source code compatibility wasn't always reliable. This meant that even though it was Linux, you still had to have a core team trained up on the intricacies of the mainframe system and programming and so it is still costly (you may need 5 people to maintain the same # of machines that a mainframe can handle with just 1 operator, but the cost of salary for that 1 mainframe specialist may be close to 5 times the cost of the average web farm maintainer which is often just a kid in college happy to make triple minimum wage).
Additionally many of the early Linux mainframe deals were for hosting services where the mainframe functioned as a place to store many many many Linux virtual machines, the end effect of that being that it didn't reduce over all system maintenance much except on the hardware level. The markets where many many many linux virtual machines are needed are often served fine by smaller hardware in bulk that can be updated regularly over time.
It's not dead, but it definitely didn't live up to expectations that IBM set.
Linux is still better suited for the mid-size and smaller hardware world. May change but IBM expected it to change very fast. Plus, 15% of new mainframes is not that large of a number. Most mainframe sales now are into existing mainframe users, it is not a growth market.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
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.
"I could walk inside it."
;)
Ahhhh! So YOU were the bug.
-m
#
# Modus Ponens
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should read:
Forget the whales - save the babies.
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.