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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."
As far as I can work out from the article what survived for 47 years was the server name and the applications.
" in its final incarnation as an Amdahl Millienium 1050.."
There is a lot of mention of IMS which wasnt available till the 1970s so all in all
this is a pretty standard history for any mainframe site. (apart from actually replacing the
mainframe which hardly ever happens).
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
Yeh, you are quite right.
I dug around the article and links in it a little more, came to the server timeline/history
1960 IBM 650 / IBM 1401 (Punched cards)
1965 IBM 360/50 / IBM 1401 (funded by NRC)
1970 IBM 360/65 / IBM 360/40 (first IMS applications)
1975 IBM 370/168
1980 Amdahl V7
1985 Amdahl 580 and V7
1990 IBM 3090-600
1995 Amdahl 5890-300
2000 Amdahl Millennium 415
2005 Amdahl Millennium 1015
Still a nice gesture, once again, mostly cause of the people who worked with it, than the machine itself.
Typically a datacentre will have 1 admin person on shift for every 800-1200 PC type servers, as opposed to the specialised staff that a mainframe needs.
The servers need the same quality of power, cooling, maintenance, security and monitoring that a mainframe does, so there's very little difference - except you can place the servers in a single rack, using a fraction of the floorspace.
Also, mainframes too are usually replaced on a 3 - 5 year cycle in most places simply for economic reasons. New tech is faster, cheaper, more reliable and supportable. The story gives the impression that the university got rid of a 47 year old mainframe - they didn't. The box they "buried" was less than 10 years old and the nonsense about card readers and monthly rental costs is completely irrelevant to the removal of the Amdahl - it would never have any of these attributes.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
If you read TFA, you'll find the mainframe they were decommissioning WAS modern - it was installed in 2005. What the funeral was for was for the line of mainframes, not a 45 year old machine still in service.
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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.