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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!
> 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.
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.
And here I was picturing the way they decommissioned that printer in Office Space after reading the article title.
Surely 25 Msec is over 17 hours, and corresponds to 40uHz.
Was the handcrank extra or did they come standard?
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. -
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
Hey, any excuse to party and burn something works for me!
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.
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
Deleted
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.
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.
Nunez!
Misery loves company. Online misery loves unsuspecting random strangers.
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?
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.
Damnit! Why can't people leave me alone?!
I couldn't tell if you were experimenting with poor-man's cryogenics or looking for the orange sherbet.
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
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!
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?