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."

Comments

Kudos

[Martian_Kyo]

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.

a bit of accurate reporting would be nice

[petes_PoV]

OK, this box might have started life in 1960 as an IBM, but it hasn't been one of those for many, many years. Like all good product lines IBM and Ahdahl have provided upgrade paths, so it stopped being it's original configuration before most slashdotters were born. I doubt that it has any of it's original parts left - not even the power plug.

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.

Re:MUH!

[Martian_Kyo]

I don't know anything for sure, nobody does. However it IS very impractical and redundant to start every sentence with 'As far as I know' or with 'I might be wrong here'.

That's understood, everything I type and know is relative to the information I have and the way I perceive it. For all we know you could be a figment of my imagination, or I could be the figment of yours, or we could be a figments of someone else's. While metaphysics are fun and seemingly profound and deep, they are ultimately pointless. The fact (question arises, what is fact and what is mass hallucination ) that computer cannot effectively communicate its feelings to me makes 'it only a thing that has no feeling to me'. Reality is not something stable, it's basically the general consensus of a large group of people. For some people God is reality, for others aliens.

So yes everything you said could be right, it could be just nonsense as well.

These arguments/discussion are pointless. The real question arises is 'Is it worth discussing?'

You said:

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? I could ask you 'Do you really know we are sims in a simulated world? What proof do you have?'
And that would make this just a modified 'Does god exist argument.'...which are pointless as well.

So here are my final statements:
Given the current evidence, I can only conclude this is the only reality there is as currently there is no evidence of any other
Given the current evidence, I can only conclude computers have no feelings, as currently there is no evidence of computers displaying self-conscious actions

The truth is not absolute, no one said it was and who ever think it is, is a bit of a fool (and we are all fools in one way or another). The truth is just a group of conclusion we can make, based on current evidence. Everything I say I know is relative to the today's truth not the absolute truth...we will never be know the absolute truth...or at least we will never be sure we know the absolute truth.

Aah - mainframes

[Linker3000]

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!"

Re:and in its place...

[morgan_greywolf]

This is called "no single point of failure". 25 servers with one down= 24 still working... There's really no "single point of failure" in most mainframe systems either. I don't know about this particular one, but most mainframes have redundant processors, mainboards, storage, power supplies, etc. In many modern mainframes you can swap out a motherboard or a power supply with no downtime. Mainframes typically run 24x7 with very minimal maintenance compared to to 25 servers. Forget "three 9's", mainframes typically have 100% uptime for years on end.

That being said, I think the debate in servers vs. mainframes is long since over -- servers won, for the most part, except in mission critical applications where 100% uptime is mandatory. Servers are cheaper and with clustering you get extremely high availability and/or computation power to spare.