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Burying a Mainframe In Style
coondoggie writes "Some users have gone to great lengths to dispose of their mainframes but few have gone this far. On November 21, 2007, the University of Manitoba said goodbye to its beloved mainframe computer by holding a New Orleans-style jazz funeral for its 47-year-old IBM 650, Betelgeuse. In case you were wondering what an IBM 650's specifications were, according to this Columbia University site, the 650's CPU was 5ft by 3ft by 6ft and weighed 1,966 lbs, and rented for $3200 per month. The power unit was 5x3x6 and weighed 2,972 pounds. The card reader/punch weighed 1,295 pounds and rented for $550/month. The memory was a rotating magnetic drum with 2000-word capacity (10 digits and sign) and random access time of 2.496 ms. For an additional $1,500/month you could add magnetic core memory of 60 words with access time of .096ms. Big Blue sold some 2,000 of the mainframes, making it one of the first successfully mass-produced computers."
It deserved a burial at C!
" On November 21, 2007, the University of Manitoba said goodbye to its beloved mainframe computer by holding a New Orleans-style jazz funeral for its 47-year-old IBM 650, Betelgeuse. "
I'll have to try that with DOS sometimes.
taking it up the freight elevator, and pushing it off the roof ala bofh is more fun.
> It leaves behind some 25 servers that are now needed
> to run these systems
25 servers that will have to be taken offline for patches,
hardware upgrades, error analysis, disk failures, subnet
changes...
25 servers that will require a dozen admin staff and ongoing
per-instance support contracts with hardware and software
vendors.
25 servers pulling a magnitude more power, requiring heavy-
duty cooling and a bank of UPS.
25 servers that will be decommissioned in three years at
``end of life''.
This is progress.
Shame they'll still be paying IBM for it for the next three years.
to the guy(or girls and guys) who did this. Any machine that has been in service or at least functional for 47 years, deserves this kind of respect and this kind of send off.
Yes, i know it's only a machine, and it has no feelings. But this is a respectful send off, and 'job well done, thank you' to all people who were involved in designing, maintaining and producing this mainframe.
Plus...it's a very cool..and sounds like fun.
So the weight and exorbitant (extortionate?) cost of the CPU are known. So how fast was it, the CPU? And how come it continued to be used this century?
Haha this got modded down before 'First Trout' did
"This is progress."?
But...but...it runs Linux.
the 650's CPU was 5ft by 3ft by 6ft and weighed 1,966 lbs, and rented for $3200 per month. The power unit was 5x3x6 and weighed 2,972 pounds.
...And if they had recycled the copper and aluminum in just one of each rather than burying them, they could have bought an entire
lab of mid-range PCs with it.
But hey, that wouldn't get kitchy national media attention.
In my twenties a bunch of friends (about 10 of us) had a Death of the 486 Party.
This was when Intel decided to focus on the Pentium chips.
We couldn't afford to sacrifice a 486 at the time, they were still too expensive but we did hold a sacrifice of a 286.
We had a ceremony, bon fire and tossed the hardware in the fire.
Flamed by alcohol and good times, it was an absolute riot!
I tried really hard to make "Betelgeuse Has A Posse," but the only image editor I have is Paint, and that's really also the extent of my image editing skills anyway. :(
And here I was picturing the way they decommissioned that printer in Office Space after reading the article title.
It's the current cute aphorism at the bottom of the page, which makes it even funnier.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Was the handcrank extra or did they come standard?
No, they LEASED THEM.
How can you abstract an article - denominating the lease rates and conclude that, "Big Blue sold some 2,000 of the mainframes.."?
Unfortunately I have witnessed cases where historic mainframes were dumped in empty land with no special consideration. It is a direct insult to the engineers who built these wonderful machines to dump them like normal trash without some sign of respect. Old computing parts should be sent to museums, not dumped like trash.
That was really informative.
echo 'cat sig | sh' > sig
In fact a Millenium 1015 is quite a recent mainframe - introduced in 2000, (hence the name) although the 1015 is the bottom of the range unit with just a single processor.
It would be nice if reporters actually researched this story instead of merely cat'n'pasting the whimsical and completely inaccurate press release.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology put the first Cray 1 sold in Sweden on display yesterday (18 Dec 2007). It has the serial number 9!
While not as old as the IBM machine, Cray always had a special aura of super-duper-power-ueber-performance to me. -
Well in the spirit. Maybe we should recycle people. Just look at all those minerals and protein going to waste. Slashdot alone would feed a lot of homeless people for months on end.
You put a rack of 25 servers, running virtualisation software with an FC array of disk storage.
Welcome to the modern mainframe.
Deleted
But how do you know this?
And do you think that you are not a machine and that you have feelings? And if so how do you know this?
How can you be so sure that the mathematical entities inside your beige box computer are not self-aware? How can you know that they don't scream when you shut the computer off and are not reborn when you grant them electrical current the next morning?
Do you really know that you are anything different than a little sim in a simulated world, or a self-aware mathematical entity in a mathematical universe?
You don't really know this for absolutely sure, do you? Then how can you claim so easily that something is only a machine and has no feelings when you don't even known whether you are a machine, and whether what you call your feelings are nothing more than simulated or mathematical constructs that you perceive as feelings?
A helping of desert is a lot of sand.
Care for some dessert instead?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
No, Dr. Jones....You do!
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
It's cheaper and less capable but I guess because it has several processors and a somewhat autonomous disk array...that's a 'mainframe'?
Not in my world.
Blar.
Manitoba is in Canada. As in the rest of the civilized world, we use the metric system over here.
Sorry about the rant, but I'm fed up about these brain dead measurement units used by only a minority of only three unimportant countries around the world. Time to wake up.
The prices should be in Canadian Dollars as well, then it's a little cheaper than what TFA says. :-)
This is one of the few times I miss being in college. I can't imagine the multi-national I now work for having enough of a sense of humor to retire a system like this.
that one or more of those Pc based servers will suffer downtime before the mainframe does.
Hell I would bet that more than half of them go out beforehand. I know, but there will be others up. Thats all well and good provided all of them are sharing the application and all associated data - or are they replicating it across many machines to provide the safety they had before?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I can remember sitting in on an IT meeting at a place where I was contracting (doing Netware Support) where one guy had to report back on his efforts to sell an old IBM Mainframe System that spanned the entire length of the computer room. The system had been replaced by this tiny, shiny, black AS400 that sat in the corner.
"Best so far is about £2000" said the man.
"You can only get £2000 for all that equipment!?" said the astonished IT Director.
"No", came the reply, "That's the cheapest to pay someone to strip it out and take it away!"
AT&ROFLMAO
The University of Manitoba is my alma mater and I have three separate thoughts about this: 1) This is the thing Telnet worked on?!? Oh dear lord! No wonder registering was hell! 2) This reeks of the engineers. Some how, some way. unbolting and turning all the seats backwards in an arts ampitheatre? Classic. 3) 25 desktops vs the mainframe. So they're going to add a couple more classrooms onto 5th floor?
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
I'd rather desert.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
One could very well use a fork, however. Do we really know anything for sure? We may choose to ignore some things or develop sets of rules to explain the reality, but is there anyone on this planet or anywhere that has even the slightest idea what the reality is?
As for applications, there's no way they ran anything mentioned in the article on the 650. All those apps require megabytes of memory and mass storage, the 650 had less than a thousandth of that.
There's only the most tenuous of connections between whatever was retired and the 650.
I believe we had one of these at Texas Instruments still running in the early 70s.
I've had this broom for 14 years. In that time its had 3 heads and 7 handles.
Once freedom is outlawed
Each time I here of the Old Blue's being retired, It bring back fond memories of many old friends.
It seems appropriate this one send off was in New Orleans.
Nunez!
Misery loves company. Online misery loves unsuspecting random strangers.
It's not as if an IBM 650 is like a modern computer, but a little slower or bigger. It would be more like TV sets from the same era.
As far as biodegradable goes, no. They're the exact opposite. Full of heavy metals and toxic compounds.
The good news is that almost every fact in the original article is wrong. The computer in question (an IBM650) had been replaced in 1965 by an upgraded model. The one that was "buried" was new in 2005. Although it was not "buried" at all - it was in all likelyhood sold off as scrap, since the price of metals such as copper has risen so much in recent years.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
A reply to all the people posting that it wasn't actually the original mainframe anymore because it had it's parts changed. Top-posting because there's too many of you :-)
Imagine that your grandfather has died, and left you his pocket watch. A beautiful, limited-edition piece, it's worth quite a lot of money, but it's emotional value to you is even greater.
You happily use it for several years, but at some point it shows it's age and stops working. You put it in at a good watchmaker, who replaces a number of parts, and it works again. It is, after all, an old watch, so this happens every so many years. Eventually, you, too, have a look at the daisies from below, and the watch goes to your son. He, too, takes great care of the watch, having it maintained and fixed as necessary.
Eventually, at some point, all parts of the watch, possibly even parts of the shell, will have been replaced.
Now, please tell me at which point it stopped being your grandfather's watch ? I say that your son, and his son, and all those after him will still think of it as the watch that they got from their father, and that once belonged to your grandfather, even though none of the original pieces are in there any more.
Additionally; suppose someone (maybe your brother, who thought he should have gotten the watch) has, over the years collected all the parts that were swapped out, and his descendants did the same; and when they got all the parts, they reassembled them into a watch that, while almost certainly non-functional, is composed of all the pieces that once made up your grandfather's watch. Do they, then, have your grandfather's watch ?
(No, the analogy isn't mine. I *think* I got it out of a Pratchett book, but I'm not entirely sure.)
What a depressingly stupid machine.
desert what? The table?
...and it should be known by now
Hearing about the 650 again brings back fond memories, but this story is very misleading on the face of it. Certainly, nothing of the original 650 could have still been present in 2007.
I live in New Orleans, I have been to many "New Orleans-style Funerals", we call them second lines. This was not a New Orleans-style funeral. Just because you play jazz at it does not make it a New Orleans-style funeral. It involves parading the carcass overhead while parading through the streets with umbrellas, dancing, music, food, and good times. It sounds like it was a tongue-in-cheek send off nonetheless.
...and it should be known by now
No third world country would want a machine from the 1960's.
It would probably cost more to transport the beast there than to buy a new, smaller, equivalent machine.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Not a mainframe. Sloppy language is good for nothing.
Blar.
This is my father's axe. I've replaced the blade twice and the handle three times, but it's still my father's axe.
Some more discussion about it here. It's also called the Ship of Theseus Paradox, which the discussion references.
There's a mention of Pratchett's Scone of Stone in "The Fifth Element." Is that what you're thinking of?
In the mid 90's I picked up an old Vax 725 at auction for pocket change because it was filled to the gills with serial ports and was a cheap way to get a bunch of modem's on a T-1 (at the time we were experimenting with a local ISP business). When I moved out of the house, I left the Vax in the basement 'cause it was so heavy and no longer of any use to me. The house was torn down as soon as I moved out. Over the time I lived in the house I had annual lobster bakes; stoned filled pit in the ground, etc. Each year the pit was dug somewhere else in my yard, used and then covered over after the consumed lobster carcasses were tossed in. I can't help but wonder what some archeologist, 10,000 years from now, will think should they uncover the mass burial of probably close to 1,000 lobsters (20 yrs, ~50 /yr) on a 1/4 acre plot, 100 miles inland from the ocean, all arranged around a mishmash of old hardware, including the Vax. If I did not know the details I would find it very puzzling. Did the lobster operate a small NOC? Was it some sort of pilgrimage for them? Was ritual crustacean sacrifice common in the early stages of the internet?
Erm ... that should read "Pratchett's Scone of Stone in The Fifth Elephant."
...
There appears to be a rate-mismatch between the fingers and the grey-matter
Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse!
How would you feel about your weight being published online?
I couldn't tell if you were experimenting with poor-man's cryogenics or looking for the orange sherbet.
I do not know what it is with us geeks and mainframes. When the 3B15 from UPR got decommissioned after I graduated, we all got an email in our jobs from the head of the computer department, telling us that. He closed it stating that it was "the end of an era". In a way, he was right, all the 3B's were replaced with Linux and Solaris systems. But, I know deep down, for all of us that worked during those times it was a poignant email to received.
Vi havas e-poston.
Filings to filings... rust to rust.
I later was taken on a tour of a SAGE (air defense radar processing) installation with its massive AN/FSQ7 vacuum tube computer and CRT displays with their vastly Buck Rogers light pens.
I might still have a relic of the IBM vacuum tube era: a plug-in tube circuit module. This was a U-shaped metal frame containing a single socketed vacuum tube, some phenolic wafers that supported various resistors and capacitors, and a plug on the bottom.
Mine, if it still exists in a box in the garage, is no longer in original condition. I removed the original components, and built upon it a 12AX7-based audio modulator (Popular Electronics magazine project) for a HeNe laser (also a PE project). The modulator actually worked for a few minutes before a power supply capacitor shorted and smoked itself and the plate transformer.
My first paid job was operating and programming an IBM 1401. Its model 1311 "washing machine" removable pack disk drives stored 2,000,000 characters, or 2,980,000 in "track record" mode (if your program could afford the memory to read and write full tracks instead of 100 character sectors). The seek actuator was hydraulic, and there was usually a small pool of leaked oil at its base.
My first thought was that if we personalized computers more, perhaps we wouldn't waste as many of them. We have become very much a disposable society, in which the strangest part of this is that anyone bats an eye about the loss of a computer. Yet I remember when we used to mourn the passing of many of them. A lot of our waste problem in the world is caused by our willingness to assume that disposing of something does not require ceremony and can be done as casually as exhaling a breath of air... except no one is recycling the air and it's getting a little stuffy in here.
It's one reason people have big weddings... to make it so expensive that you think twice before throwing it away on a mere argument. If throwing away a machine were more expensive, maybe we'd think twice about doing it... or better still, about buying one in the first place.
Yes, it would hold back progess. But where is progress leading us right now? With luck, we'll have computers powerful enough to solve the problems we created by having computers. And without luck, we may poison our world and all die. Ah, yes, the smell of progress is all around us.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
It's not a jazz funeral without a second line, come on!
Why link to an inaccurate summary posted on another forum? Go to the source for the actual information: http://umanitoba.ca/mainframe/index.php
I am the proud developer of the actual site that TFA is linking to, you can see it at: http://umanitoba.ca/mainframe We are all amazed by the popularity of this event! And just for the record, the mainframe was RECYCLED so don't worry, we are very environmentally friendly here at the U of M!
Don't they normally just sell these to spare-parts shops? Unless its the last one in the world, the existing ones will need replacement parts.
A lot of third-world countries still rely on older mainframes because they have more labor than money, meaning that keeping an old machine running is cheaper for them than buying a new one. My dad has a buddy who made a killing selling old mainframe and mini parts overseas.
Table-ized A.I.
yup
:(
:(
Sometimes i feel like this site is a contest for the worst summary one can get posted......
With the specs given one could replace it with my pocket calculator
We did run our minicomputer from 1982 til 1997 with no changes. Current 'server' is hopelessly outdated at half that age but was 1000 times better value
Reality is what you experience.
This implies that the ERH (External Reality Hypothesis) is wrong (and it follows logically that the MUH, Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, may also be wrong). But then we don't live in the same reality as dolphins, whales, ants, pigeons, cats, snails, trees, grass, or viruses (if these tiny things are what we call life - in fact they look more like genetic material without a host, and curiously their sole purpose seems to be to find a host, which probably implies that genetic material in general in all organisms is some sort of parasitic squatter). These creatures experience very different things than us. Whales and birds are expert in 3D reasoning (while us humans we tend to think in left-right rather than up-down-left-right). Ants probably regard pheromones as one of the most important part of their reality. Snails probably know more than you about plants. Grass surely has complete knowledge in how it feels to be walked over by smelly human feet every day. Different sensory organs and different mental setups result in different perceptions of reality. But if the reality is what you experience, then the realities of a human and a whale are different, or even we could say that different realities exist between two humans with different senses (eg a deaf and blind), so there must be many realities? And if there are many realities, then how can communication take place between these realities? Occam would probably freak out and threaten us with his big razor if we hinted at multiple realities, one for each set of sensory organs and mental wireups.
Maybe there is just one reality and we experience it differently because of different sensory organs. The problem is then, that we really do not know what reality really truly is. We have eyes for the shades but not for the light. We can hypothesise that reality is the dream of a god, the simulation of an alien race, the self-aware mathematical stuff in a fractal abyss of equations and fractions, or whatever, but in the end we don't even have the slightest idea of what the hell we are talking about.
Do you kill a life every time you breathe or you walk down the street? Take a microscope. There are tiny creatures everywhere. Some of them get hurt while you breathe or when your shoes cause some water in the street to be dropped away and dry up. You need a microscope to see them. They are perfectly alive creatures, they eat, they run away from predators, and they catch their food. Yet, they are completely undetectable to you without a microscope. A new sensory capability created by technology broadened your horizons of your reality. This is a strong argument in support of the ERH.
Do you kill a self-aware mathematical structure every time you shut down your computer? Nobody really knows with 100% certainty... until someone proves that self-aware mathematical structures cannot exist, in which case we can safely continue shutting off our PCs, or invents a device that expands our view of the cosmos and allows us to actually see that there is some kind of life or consciousness inside the beige box our technology created (or even everywhere around us and inside us and above us) in which case people who want to be perfectly ethical with no sense of practicality will probably declare bankruptcy after heightened electricity bills (and some could say this would be evolution at works, others could argue that it was the revenge of the mathematical stuff, while some sim philosophers would probably profess that everything is a simulation so we shouldn't take reality seriously).
There's no point trying to make it any more complicated than that.
Discoveries begin with questions, and questions need creativity and out of the box thinking. Taking reality as an unquestionable truth according to some sort of "common sense" criteria means we lose the chance to discover something about it... If your reality is that we live in a universe ruled by a god whose rele
MR. PYCROFT:
Wonderful what we can do nowadays.
[ping]
Aah! I see you have the machine that goes 'ping'. This is my favourite. You see, we lease this back from the company we sold it to,
and that way, it comes under the monthly current budget and not the capital account.
[applause]
Thank you. Thank you. We try to do our best. Well, do carry on.
At least that is how Monty Pyhton says the system works.
Of course I used to work with a group that rescued these old pieces of big iron. I've lost touch and I believe the collection was transfered to another group in RI.
I asked a VCR whether it has any feelings and it suddenly started playing an old porn movie. I guess it meant to tell me to fsck off and stop asking personal questions. Don't know, maybe it really meant that it can feel horny... Or maybe it was just a gremlin in the machine. But who can really know what a freakin VCR feels?
In other news, Microsoft and Sony goes to court over unsold PS3 and VISTA burial grounds dispute.
Am I misreading this? My experience is orders of magnitude different, are you just referring to administering hardware and no applications/os/etc.?
I think there's a lot of misleading information in the original article, so I'm glad you dug up the truth. To expand on what you discovered, in 2000 (7 years ago this month) IBM began shipping its 64-bit z900 model. At virtually the same time you could boot the operating system into 64-bit mode, and you got a substantial subcapacity software discount as soon as you did that. The same year, the University of Manitoba bought the now-obsolete 31-bit [sic] Amdahl 415, probably with full knowledge that the 64-bit revolution was already in motion. By early 2001, 64-bit Linux appeared. UoM couldn't run it. By that time, if it wasn't clear before, Amdahl was telling the newspapers they would not develop 64-bit technology, so UoM had to know. In 2002, IBM introduced the 64-bit z800, a smaller machine than the z900. UoM didn't buy one. In 2004, IBM introduced the 64-bit z890, an even better smaller machine, with still lower software charges, more configuration choices, and various other improvements. UoM didn't buy one. Also in 2004, IBM introduced 64-bit DB2. UoM couldn't run it. In 2005, UoM bought an incredibly crusty 31-bit [sic] Amdahl 1015, which couldn't run 64-bit software IBM introduced now 5 years prior. In 2006, IBM introduced the 64-bit System z9 BC, with even lower software charges, even more configuration choices, various other improvements, and slashed the hardware price up to 50%. UoM didn't buy one. By this time z800 prices were crashing into the US$30K to $40K range on the secondary market, lower than the price of a mediocre distributed UNIX server. UoM didn't buy one. In late 2006, IBM introduced 64-bit WebSphere Application Server. UoM couldn't run it. In the spring of 2007, IBM introduced CICS Transaction Server Version 3.2 with 64-bit features. UoM couldn't run it. At about the same time, IBM introduced the second version of 64-bit DB2. UoM couldn't run that either. In March, 2007, after literally years of notice, IBM discontinued support for 31-bit z/OS, the last version that can run on an Amdahl. On April 1, 2007, UoM was unsupported.
At the end of 2007, UoM unplugged their thoroughly rotted, year 1999-priced, can't-educate-anybody-on-anything-still-relevant, non-IBM mainframe that couldn't run software that IBM introduced over the past 7 years. Why should anyone be surprised that an organization would unplug technology they mismanaged so badly?
I would like to see it "launched" in a trebuchet. We did that to one of last 9-track tape drives we had at my old work place. We used a old roll up garage door opener spring and a series of pulleys and a old flat conveyor (like the one you see at the airport loading planes) and we launched the about 50 feet away. There was pool to see how far it would fly and the proceeds went to Red Cross.
"47-year-old mainframe" !!
Gimme a break!
If you RTFA, you'd see it was a fairly recent Amdahl, that happened to be still running an old IBM 1960s program under emulation in some subspace.
Ha! They probably wrote an x86 emulator to run the old program on a PC's VM, rather than take the time to re-code it.
Card readers. Paper tape readers. What retro-sensationalist crap.
I pretty sure they got rid of this hardware a quarter of a century ago!
But I guess it makes good press on a slow IT day...
SVC 202, anyone?
.
- aqk
F U