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Why OldTech Keeps Kicking
Hugh Pickens writes "In 1991 Stewart Alsop, the editor of InfoWorld, predicted that the last mainframe computer would be unplugged by 1996. Just last month, IBM introduced the latest version of its mainframe, and technologies from the golden age of big-box computing continue to be vital components in modern infrastructure. The New York Times explores why old technology is still around, using radio and the mainframe as perfect examples. 'The mainframe is the classic survivor technology, and it owes its longevity to sound business decisions. I.B.M. overhauled the insides of the mainframe, using low-cost microprocessors as the computing engine. The company invested and updated the mainframe software, so that banks, corporations and government agencies could still rely on the mainframe as the rock-solid reliable and secure computer for vital transactions and data, while allowing it to take on new chores like running Web-based programs.'"
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Because the people who are used to that tech haven't kicked (the bucket).
Basic psychology. People stick with what they're used to, even if it doesn't always make the most sense.
Look at the inability of people to drive using joysticks, instead sticking to the classic wheel arrangement. I've seen drive by wire setups using joysticks, they work well, but people just can't get into them.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
I DON'T SEE WHAT THE BIG PROBLEM IS. I
HAVE BEEN POSTING FROM MY COMMODORE 64 F
OR TWENTY YEARS NOW AND IT IS WORKING JU
ST FINE FOR ME!
The damned lameness filter has just managed to destroy my joke. Thanks a lot, filter.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Some things are just good ideas that work well. That's all there is to it. Sure, something more refined may come along one day, but it will need to be significantly better and offer a lot more. Otherwise, tried and true technology will hang around. Pretty simple, really.
This guy's the limit!
Ten years gone, and still relevant.
Damn I miss Byte.
Best Slashdot Co
The x86 architecture
The QWERTY keyboard
SATA (yes, folks, a serial version of the old IBM AT bus!)
Drive letters, DOS devices
Does anyone actually use the tar program for its original purpose anymore?
"mainframe sales are a tiny fraction of the personal computer market"
I'm pretty sure that mainframe sales are 0% of the personal computer market.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Does noone else see the irony in a newspaper exploring the reasoning behind "old" technology being used in modern environments?
With a "Bill Gates" 640k view of the world, of course we wouldn't need mainframe computers. Desktops now have more than enough power to run even the largest server applications of 1991 hands down and it's easy to see where that statement came from.
The problem with the vision is that Stewart Alsop didn't take into account the growing complexity of computer programs. We have plenty of (in comparison to the software of 1991) inefficient applications that require ridiculous amounts of computer power to serve and process everything we need done. We have complex server applications like gigantic databases and games and video servers that couldn't exist in the 1991 world.
The mainframe of yesteryear may now fit into the physical space of today's desktop... or smaller, but that doesn't mean there won't be a need for a bigger and faster one to take its place. That's as true now as it was then.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
I was at a conference and at a BOF where I raised this question and technology. One person said that at the end of the day Microsoft will be replaced by Google apps.
I said, yeah sure Microsoft will be replaced like IBM and the mainframe will be replaced. He then went on and explained to me on how the mainframe is dead. I looked at him and laughed because there are still oodles of people using the mainframe and there will be oodles of people using Microsoft.
It is not that Google apps will replace, but will complement Microsoft, like the mainframe compliments Microsoft. Where the real understanding begins is when you know what to use when...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
First, mainframes have many reliability and redundancy features that aren't found or aren't common in other hardware. If you spend the money, you can get 100% uptime guarantees.
Second, there's a lot of software written for the mainframe that works. It does important stuff, and what it does is probably not exceedingly well documented, and porting all that shit to something new is a massive, risky, expensive task.
Why mess with what works, particularly if the vendor seems to be willing to keep the product line going? There's no pressing reason to move, apart from people's prejudices about the mainframe, and the benefits really don't come close to outweighing the costs/risks.
FTA: First, it seems, there is a core technology requirement: there must be some enduring advantage in the old technology that is not entirely supplanted by the new.
This is what keeps a lot of "old" technology going. Over the past 30 years, I've seen the predicted demises of printed books, keyboard-entry word processing, land-line phone systems, and so on. Yet, each of them seems to still be chugging along. e-books are here, but, as it turns out they have lacks when it comes to the readability and portability, as well as being usable in many environments. Keyboard entry word processing was supposed to have been supplanted long since by voice recognition technology, which is another technology which always seems to be "5 or 10 years away". Cell phones were supposed to supplant all land-line phones, but it turns out there are places you can't get a signal, and you can also do a lot of other things with that land line that you can't do with a cell. Each of these supposed supplantive technologies turned out to have issues that the "old" tech didn't have. It doesn't mean that the new wasn't useful, but in terms of supplanting the old, it didn't happen.
oh, wait, that's a perfectly functional technology that is being made obsolete by greed. I guess not all working things are good.
I'll create an amusing sig when I have something meaningful to post.
The title says it all. People stick with old tech because it works well and suits their purposes. Mainframes have a great use to folks that need a reliable system with good support. Don't fix it if it ain't broken.
I keep waiting for people to stop using the wheel and come up with a more efficient solution. It can't last forever, ya know...
IBM understand the mathematics of computing. They know what has to be made to work in order to make the mathematics work for you, not against you.
Systems (all systems, not just computers) have built in mathematics, if you choose one type of system over another without understanding those maths it can cost you a serious bundle. The evidence I've seen in the IT industry generally is that most developers and systems engineers don't understand those maths... Or at least, they don't understand how it applies to reality.
Deleted
I used to make CD players for one of the tech giants, as such I was in China alot. When I say "make" I'll be more specific - I wrote the firmware.
I remember vividly a conversation with one of the chinese project managers. I was discussing the build quality of a new CD player for the US markets. It had that brown cardboard like PCB that the racks leap off if you wave a soldering iron in the general vicinity. The PCBS, the unit front, the enfire casework was glued together with a hot glue gun. The radio tuning circuit was wire wrapped around a pencil and then "frozen" in place with dripped wax whilst the software was expected to adapt to mask any tolerance issues. The manager and his team gave it a projected life span of 18 months, then the consumer would be back to buy another, he was really enthusiastic about the repeat business.
*That* is why old tech survives because it was built to last, not with built in obsolescence. And no, I never brought a CD player from my employer ever again.
This should clearly be tagged: getoffmylawn
Sheldon
I keep seeing new ways to do the same old things; perform a credit transaction, store a health record, track inventory etc. Many of these requirements have changed little for decades if not centuries, and new requirements like enhanced security are easily accomodated in a centralized environment.
The original systems created to satisfy these requirements were lightweight and efficient to run on the machinery of the time and easily managed by virtue of being centralized. By contrast, many new solutions are bloated and hard to manage because of their de-centralised nature and the need to use whatever networking protocol was simplest to implement regardless of its suitability for the task. God forbid that anyone has to look at a terminal font to get information from a system - if it's not in Times new Roman then it's just not proper information.
The sole purpose for the replacement of the older systems seems to have been "because we wanted a GUI" to make it un-neccessary to train our users or because companies thought that they could axe experienced network admins and terminal equipment that they perceived to be 'locking them' to a vendor. Now I see that in many cases the management of large systems has been "de-skilled" and involves such a cocktail of technologies that nobody knows quite how it all hangs together (least of all how secure it all is).
Best just throw in more resources to make the IT problem go away, at least it's spread over several bills so it seems easier to pay for...
Nullius in verba
I'm no dinosaur, but I'm old enough to appreciate some of the advantages of old tech. Example: While I value the portability of mp3's (my PDA has a bunch of them on it), I'm somewhat sad that a lot of younger people seem to think they can compete with what I hear when I get home and crank up my 30-year-old, high-end stereo system. A lot of today's music is so squashed down and distorted to get the high volume levels that even really good tunes wind up sounding like crap. And how many of those mp3 files have little micro-skips in them? Believe me, plugging them into a good system won't make them sound any better.
Once you've heard a song mixed properly, with the loudness supplied my a big, honking amp, you find it very hard even to put up with some radio stations and CD's. I'm far from alone in this opinion, and I'm confident there will be a ready market for big systems and, yes, even turntables, for a long time to come.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Mainframes are still around because of institutional inertia... they've been running the same software for 25 years, so why change now? Sure the hardware might be new and maybe the OS does cool things like virtualize Linux but why change things?
Makes it much easier to retire from an IT job with 20, 30, or even 40 years of service! I mean Penn State has been running the same backend for its student and business services for 25 years!
Of course, any new employees who don't know COBOL, PL/1, or Smalltalk are kinda screwed.
EMA
Fortran was introduced in the early fifties, but is still alive and kicking. Fortran 2003 even has object orientation. I think that Fortran is a good example as it shows that "old tech" can survive if it is allowed to improve, i.e. transform into "new tech". So, could it be more of a naming problem and that we don't have any "old tech" around after all?
If you spend the money you can also make your servers have a 100% uptime guarantee as well. Hardware wise anyway. The OS/applications are a different story. Most *nix based should be doable. windows based, different story. I am hoping to actually to be able to a full windows update without a reboot someday. Unless the kernel changed, there should be no reason to reboot the machine. Take down an app, sure if there was an update to that app. But not the whole machine.
so we still need mainframes. IBM JCL lives forever as well.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Coming from a person who has worked a lot on cars, I would prefer to work on an older car any day. Why? Simply put, there are fewer points of failure. When your car doesn't run right, what do you check? In older models you have things to check which are mostly mechanical. In newer models you have some mechanical and some electronic, which leaves a lot of things to investigate and can end up being a humongous hassle. (*begin short rant* for example what idiot thought it was a good idea to electronic fuel pumps inside the gas tank whereas mechanical fuel pumps are connected to the engine *end short rant*) There may be small variations in advancements in the mechanical parts, but those are tried and true and have been implemented since probably the 50s. The tried and true old technology is relatively more simple than the newer technology and easier to fix as long as it can serve the same function. This may be slightly different for older electronic technology, but I would figure that the comparison to cars would work just fine.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
That's ancient tech.
How about a bottle or a bucket?
Try an even older and more generic container, a sack.
Old tech hangs around because it does it's job and has not been improved upon in any meaningful fashion by later tech.
Incandescent lights might actually exit the stage soon...
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
"The mainframe survived its near-death experience and continues to thrive because customers didn't care about the underlying technology,"
That is the answer right there. Not every user is irrationally neophilic. If a technology is the best choice either in function or in cost with respect to the needs of some user, then it will continue to be used.
What would be the cost of hiring on top of the existing mainframe admins and developers a team to migrate this stuff to Windows or UNIX? Remember some of this code is written by people who not only have left the company but may have died. Then you have to hire new developers and administrators for the UNIX/Windows systems. Change always creates the potential for problems, so expect a higher percentage of disruptions to the business as you're doling out all this money. If IBM is making it easy for you to keep what you have going, and also allows Linux, web etc. capability, why spend all that money to transition? The answer is that a lot of times companies don't. I worked at a Fortune 100 company that still had plenty of IBM mainframes. They even had a lot of their printing handled by the mainframes, although there were Windows and UNIX gateways into the print queue.
PC's have been around for over 25 years. Is that not old? They constantly evolve.
Mainframes constantly evolve.
Mainframes went 64 bit before the PC ever did. Virtualisation is just gaining ground on the PC.
Mainframes have had that for decades with Domains and LPAR's.
Whats old technology, a PC server farm with dedicated server per app, and maybe 10 concurrent users, or a mainframe running many applications with thousands of users, and terrabytes of i/o throughput.
If you ask me, mainframes were more about I/O rates than raw number crunching in the processor. For every NASA-type application, there were a hundred large companies that needed payroll and bookkeeping operations.
The thing that's really killing the mainframe isn't the desktop's increased CPU power, but rather the desktop's cheaper, very fast I/O. Hence you no longer need the mainframe's specialized hardware pipelining everything from disc to RAM to register, with massive vector operands to boot.
A Trash-80 could run the calculations necessary to process paychecks for the whole US, or GM's parts inventory, in a reasonable amount of time if it could just get the data I/O fast enough.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
be interesting to find out how often the guy is this wrong.
I still remember from the old whole earth catalog, how they recommended these super expensive foam swords - sort of a pre yuppie yuppism.
There are cases where lots of little computers make sense, and there are cases where one big computer makes sense.
Imagine if every apartment in your block had its own self-contained waste water system - a complete individual sewage processing plant for every house. It makes no sense at all, so you have mains drainage and a big sewage processing plant somewhere out of town (hopefully). Now imagine a rural area where houses are miles apart. How do you deal with waste water? A septic tank - a complete individual sewage processing plant, for every house. It makes no sense to lay mains drainage there.
It's a shit analogy, I know.
Sorry, man; no mod points.
Breakfast served all day!
COBOL for business and FORTRAN for science.
These are half-century-old languages (though updated to ObjectOriented).
Some source codes havent been touched in decades.
Actually, no matter how fast your PC is, PCs and mainframes are engineered for different things. Many mainframe-class machines specialize in transaction processing and are designed for total I/O speed, rather than chip clock speed. People also pay the big bucks for mainframes not because they are fast but because they never, ever crash nor require downtime. Don't let Apple calling a G4 Mac a "supercomputer" confuse you -- a mainframe is still highly specialized equipment, and I doubt there's any application that you personally might need to run that would require one. On the other hand, no matter how fast desktop chips get, it seems unlikely to me that major Wall Street banks would ever switch from mainframes to PC-class hardware for financial transaction processing.
Breakfast served all day!
If I wanted to do something high-tech and expensive for traffic info, I could probably get some kind of traffic-integrated-GPS-thing; in a few cities there's also a low-tech cheap traffic widget that has a fixed LCD map and gets traffic by subscription for $5-10/month on some kind of radio channel. It's not as detailed about individual events as the every-10-minutes traffic radio, but it covers more of the highways and you don't have to wait for reports.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Serious question from someone who entered the industry 10 years ago - what's the difference between a mainframe and a big-arse IBM pSeries (if any)?
Such submissions should not be accepted. Let's no make Slashdot another spam tube.
The software is mission critical to the business, and it only runs in the mainframe environment.
It's been in maintenance mode for the last 30 years. The last person who understood how the software really works left the company in 1983. It's too big to rewrite in one go, and rewriting it in pieces is not practical.
So what options do you really have?
New things, at least in certain fields, are generally more complicated than the old things. The more complex it is, the more parts it has, the more can go wrong, the more maintenance it requires.
I've been to a nuclear research facility, here in Czech Republic, where they had two particle accelerators. One old Soviet one, which looked like an old-fashioned submarine, one new fancy one, which looked like it was stolen from CERN. When I asked the people working there why are they still using the old one, they seemed shocked and answered: "How can we NOT use it? It takes 10 minutes to stop it, put something new in and re-start. The new one takes 8 hours only to completely halt."
Maintenance is a similar thing. A spoon doesn't really need any, a solar-powered ultra-auto-feeder (with a 12W automatic mouth feeder) needs a lot..
There are two kinds of people - those who are radioactive and those who have already decayed..
For the same reason that I still think Commander Keen is fun. Shiny new-ness isn't necessarily better. Better graphics doesn't make a game more fun. If it works, don't fix it. At least the consumptive trend of planned obsolescence hasn't touched everything.
Do automobiles actually solve the problem or do we make solutions that fit around the automobile? We insist on laying out cities so people need to move long distances on a regular basis. We also don't make effective mass transit. Finally people's egos are attached to a vehicle.
Nah.
Somewhere Out There I bet there is at least one dude who somehow commandeered a full strength mainframe and is using it for completely nauseatingly high-end gaming.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
It's time for my slide rule user's group meeting, don't want to be late! I knew those newfangled calculating devices would never catch on!
Yes, I do own a few slide rules, and yes, I use them in class from time to time.
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.
Mainframes are still around because the engineering is better.
There's no secret about how to do this. It wouldn't even add much cost to servers to do it right. Here's what's needed.
Once you have all that fault isolation, you know which component broke. This produces ongoing pressure for better components. It empowers customers to be effective hardasses about components breaking. With proper fault isolation and logging, you know what broke, you know when it broke, you know if others like it broke, and you probably know why it broke. So you know exactly which vendor needs the clue stick applied. There's none of this "reinstall the operating system and maybe it will go away" crap.
Mainframes are about three things:
- Reliability
- Availability
- Capacity (including compatibility across upgrades)
in that order.
Reliability is the absolute must. Dropping pennies through the cracks adds up to big bucks in lost coinage and much BIGGER bucks in legal trouble from the people whose pennies got lost. Consistently total the bill wrong and you face class action suits, too.
Mainframes don't make errors, period. The internal components DO make errors, and the mainframe fixes the errors so the result is correct (though it may be delayed by milliseconds when a bit drops internally). They do this a number of ways: Error detection/bus-logging/stop-fix-restart, redundant components and voting, redundant components and comparison (see "error detection..."), error correcting codes to name just a few.
Redundant collections of less reliable machines don't cut it. Businesses solve the "distributed update problem" by avoiding it: Transactions are processed on a single, ultra-reliable, server. The data is backed up (offsite and often dynamically via a network) so that, in case of disaster, they can switch to ANOTHER single, ultra-reliable, server. But spreading the work over multiple flakey machines is not an option. (They know how to do it with people. But they don't want to go there with computers when there's a better option.)
- Availability is right up there.
Drop the real-time logging of phone calls for a reboot and a baby-bell's ong-distance phone lines are free. That's in the million bux and hour range. But it's a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of an outage in the trading support systems of a major brokerage.
- Capacity must continue to be "enough" as a business grows.
Throttling a growing business because the IT department can't crunch the extra transactions kills shareholder value. And this includes compatibility: Thrashing the applications and inducing delays and bugs, just to port to a machine of the necessary capacity, also isn't an option. A business-critical legacy application has to "just work" if the system must be upgraded for higher capacity. The source may be long lost and the programmer long dead, so even recompilation (or reASSEMBLY) may not be practical options. (Even if the source code ISN'T lost it may be in a language that's no longer supported and/or with no experts available.)
===
Makers of non-mainframe computers and their components and operating systems still haven't "gotten it" on these issues. The hardware designs are almost totally composed of "single points of failure" and flake out from time to time. OS crashes are a way of life (especially with the "dominant desktop OS" - which is what business decision-makers see).
The chip makers blew it with things like Weitek's floating-point accelerator that didn't do denormals and Intel's Pentium bug. (Those little numbers are VERY important for things like interest calculations.) In particular, Intel could have recovered from that by immediately replacing the chips with the fixed ones and giving business customers priority. Instead they fought it and claimed that the errors didn't matter for anybody but the users of "high-end games". GAMES? What does THAT look like to a guy in a business suit in the executive suite of a fortune 500 corporation?
Imperfect computers can work for the desktops that support the imperfect people who handle the day-to-day operation. The infrastructure is already in place for distributing the load across them and recovering from their errors. And they can work for the core of a network - where protocols can repeat dropped packets and machines can route around failed peers and cables. But like the EDGE of a network (where a customer's lines funnel through a single box, which must have telephone-switch-like reliability), the core of corporations' information processing is already built on and optimized for near-perfectly-operating machines. Despite their cost they're FAR cheaper and less risky than switching to, and running on, something less.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Much of the Prius is drive by wire (especially the throttle)--but they kept the old model. When I first got my prius I thought simulating the "creep" in an automatic transmission on drive by wire was stupid. I now think it makes sense--as that's what we're really used to. In other ways, keeping existing models but changing the implementation is good design.
I'm not sure I see what's wrong with the steering wheel as an input device for turning a car. However, there's no real reason why the wheel could just be turning a potentiometer that controls the steering. The original reason for a steering wheel was the mechanical advantage (thus the reason trucks had bigger steering wheels. Perhaps we should go back to the tiller -- which was what some of the original cars had.
in this internet era.
If it works and there's nothing better or cheaper to replace it it will stay around.
How about the car? Over 100 years old and kicking with no end in sight. Trains... 200 years.
The article should be titled "Why the demise of a technology is often greatly exaggerated by pundits."
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Here's one point to chew on, regardless of what type of system is between the user interface and the final output:
A steering wheel will allow a driver to more successfully handle a bump in the road versus a joystick. Why? Any bump results in a linear force that eventually acts upon the mass of the driver. Hit a bump, and the driver's body lurches up, down, or sideways as a result. Since the joystick takes linear motion inputs, it is more susceptible to input errors based on these unintentional movements.
The steering wheel, on the other hand, requires a moment (either clockwise or counter-clockwise) for input. While some linear movement can still induce a change in the wheel's position, the effect is much less significant since bumps don't create rotational movement of the driver.
Adding to this is that a wheel can be grasped and used by the driver to steady themselves while negotiating turns. The sideward motion (centripetal force) can be nulled with the proper hand position on a steering wheel, but not with a joystick. "Hanging On" to a joystick would most likely cause an unwanted countersteering input (i.e. hang a hard right and your body weight would end up pulling the stick left, unintentionally widening the turn).
Bottom line, a steering wheel will offer better rejection of unwanted input versus a joystick in a car.
...it's because it works.
if it ain't broken...
Kenwood's Music Keg car audio device had an option for auto-downloading content from your computer via 802.11 when it was within range.
Call me when DLL hell is canonically over, my employers have several hundred apps we'll want to update.
Have you noticed the way dependencies have been growing absurdly in all the gnome-based linux distros? You might have to load bluetooth and palmpilot apps in order to make a server point to your enterprise LDAP directory... sure, that makes sense.
I can so say what you find unusual about your sig, as this post (don't count my sig that follows) has that oddity too. Huzzah! I admit it's off topic, so mod accordingly. Sigh.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
I think old tech survives because of two reasons, one following the other. First, businesses develop inertia along a certain platform. For example, banks write a lot of code that is restricted to run in a mainframe environment (for whatever reason, it can't be moved off). "Inertia," in this case, means that a lot of code and business processes and practice have been developed around that platform. Perhaps even jobs have been created that are primarily concerned with the care and feeding of this platform and all it supports.
Then, time passes. People forget, and people leave. New people take over. At some point, if enough complexity develops and sits over a long enough period of time, the entity that owns the platform and all it supports basically loses control of it. They have no knowledge contained outside the system itself...to make significant changes requires someone to delve into it and tease out the why's and wherefore's of how it works. Either that, or replace it wholesale, abandoning all of the functionality of the code and the stability that comes along with the associated business processes.
If no one quite understands how something works, or even the totality of what it does, then it becomes easier to upgrade an existing platform than replace it. In some cases, the platform can only be upgraded in certain ways that maintains some restrictions of the original platform. And that's why old tech has staying power. No one knows what it does, how it works, or understands the impact of or effort required to replace it.
I think this cycle is inevitable to some extent where complex systems are required to fulfill some needed function. However, I also think there is much that businesses could do to prevent these issues where they are not necessary. I think the fundamental thing that needlessly ties businesses down to old tech is an improper segmentation of responsibilities within the company. Many times, departments and created and responsibilities assigned based not on the actual work that needs to be done, but rather the prejudices of executive management. A work force should be divided up based on areas of related responsibility and the dependencies between those groups, and nothing else. (This is usually how things are done at the low level of organizing groups, but go one or two levels up on the org chart and the concept seems to no longer apply at most places.)
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
The NYT is wrong. There are no low-cost processors in the mainframes. The "CPUs" are multi-chip assemblies of 16 to 20 chips, each devoted to a specific function. While the processing units in these assemblies might share some technical background with Power processors found in UNIX servers, the similarities are only skin-deep and the processors are anything but off-the-shelf low-cost chips.
There is a nice set of slides here.
Fantasy: http://ferrisfantasy.blogspot.com/
New tech fits a different market. Mainframes power through large data sets extremely quickly, and have a specialized hardware and software architecture for such batch jobs that produces entirely unacceptable responsiveness and prohibitive costs for desktop use. The same can be said about the old tech of internal combustion engines versus radial, rotary, or gas turbine designs (portability, simplicity, serviceability); or vacuum tubes versus op-amps (sure silicon is portable and works; but only tubes give real full-range analog response right up until you saturate them--and then they overdrive different than silicon too).
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Didn't PCs come along because people needed some kind of a "personal computer" as opposed to a mainframe?
In other news: today, aircraft carrier sales are a tiny fraction of the weekend pleasure cruiser market.
"Mainframe" is servicable, supported, robust, high performance, and reliable. You're buying that when you buy "mainframe," it just so happens that IBM packages that in a larger sized computer. Technology is a fairly small part of that idea. To make "mainframe" go away you have to convince the world that the idea is no good, but it's really really really good.
Don't worry, I'm sure it wasn't because your joke was lame or anything...
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
The hardware is better, and arguably the software is better. But man, if you are a hobbyist wondering about getting some z/OS experience, it sucks to be you. There are no options for someone who wants to inexpensively "try out" z/OS in the commercial sector. Unless you count $350 USD per month for time-limited access per month of leased computer time "inexpensive". That option is through IBM's Remote Developer Program. Service bureaus will give you the same deal for $3-4,000 USD per month. Due to the IBM vs. PSI lawsuit, you can no longer purchase a Flex ES solution. By the way, for those into computer law, IBM in that suit is trying to argue that all emulation is illegal. I can't say I blame IBM for being pissed that PSI is trying to emulate z/OS on HP-UX Itanium, though. You can also try to buy an IBM mainframe outright. While everything the z/OS fanboys claim about the platform are true, they neglect to mention that the minimum entry fee for new z/OS hardware and software today is $250K USD plus about $50K USD per year of operating and licensing costs, and a machine room with three-phase power that can literally hold hundreds of pounds of equipment. IBM considers that a cheap baby mainframe today (I guess the deskside form factor true baby mainframes didn't make enough profit to justify their continuation). The fanboys also neglect to mention that IBM is actively shutting down anyone who tries to buy used z/OS platforms, or anyone who tries to supply cheap hobbyist access to z/OS. I know because I inquired about exactly these possibilities. It is an incredibly cool platform, and distributed folks can learn a heck of a lot from the z/OS community, who rightly feel slighted. I'm still blown away by some new concepts that I encounter in z/OS, and wish were available in Linux or even a commercial Unix like AIX. Just be aware that if you are a hobbyist, you are not invited unless you are a student affiliated with one of IBM's academic partners, or work somewhere that already uses z/OS and is friendly to z/OS noobs.
I'd say you can get close, but as far as I know, not even the zSeries has a purchasable 100% guarantee - 99.999%, probably; active failover to a separate site, yes; but everyone has "act of God" clauses.
That is all.
...old tech stays around simply because technology is nothing but solutions to problems. If the problem hasn't changed, then why do you need to replace the solution?... if all you need to do is surf the web, read emails and make simple documents, then the watermark solution to this problem is actually a computer that's more than 10 years old.
The mainframe and the radio survive and perform their current functions because they were the "fittest" to do so. Simply natural selection applied to industrial tech.
When I got my amateur radio license, I was surprised to find that the use of Morse code is alive and well in the amateur community. While it doesn't have the high data rates of voice or digital modes, Morse code has greater range, uses the minimum bandwidth, and is intelligible through a much higher noise threshold than the other modes. Of course, many amateurs have never tried Morse code, but the few that do exploit its unique advantages.
For the same reasons, mainframes may never have as large a market as PCs, but they will remain alive and well in the market that appreciates the unique advantages of the mainframe.
There's an old saying in the industry that still holds true: "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM." They provide the customer service businesses trust, and that's what closes the deal in large-scale business systems (and brings in a large, ongoing revenue stream). Look at their name: International Business Machines. Their reputation came from getting the job done year after year, from protecting the money spent on applications, development, and client data from instant obsolescence.
Companies remember that IBM mainframes give them years of faithful service, with on-site support a phone call away. Compare that to your PC experience!
We love this story. They sure know how to write this article, they do it every year! Be it old Cobol programmers, the lack of people entering the field, failed death predictions, you name it, they will find a way to write an article about the mainframe still ticking. And I say go ahead, cause I love to read em!
I love this "single point of failure" argument. It's a fallacy. The only single point of failure with a single mainframe is the building it physically sits in. A single mainframe is internally redundant in every possible respect you can think of (and several you didn't think of). It is that cluster you talk about fondly, except there's no (error-prone) self-assembly and no particular management burden required. It. Just. Works.
But if you're concerned about a building failure -- fire, flood, whatever -- you can buy a second machine. IBM will sell that second machine to you at a lower price. You can put the second machine in a second building, you can run fiber (preferably with two separate physical paths) between the two machines, keep them many tens of kilometers apart, and run them as a single, seamless cluster (called a Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex). And, as a programmer, you have absolutely zero coding responsibility to make that all work. If anything bad happens all your transactions instantly flip over to the other site, in-flight, real-time. And you don't lose a single byte or a single customer, and you can prove you didn't. You can also service any element of that cluster -- any element, from software to hardware to network to whatever -- without any interruption in business service. Yes, you can upgrade your database engine version while everybody's credit cards keep working. Neat party trick, that, but it's business-as-usual for mainframes.
Scalable? Each machine contains up to 64 main processors (and a minimum of two spares!) running at 4.4 GHz with more cache (and more cache levels, including copious shared cache) than anything else. (Even the clock speed argument is gone. It's a faster clock speed than X86.) Plus scores of secondary processors -- the main processors only do real work, not encryption or I/O. They don't even handle clustering -- there are dedicated processors for that. You can stuff 1.5 TB of RAM in each frame. And you can have a single cluster -- which behaves like a single logical machine from a programmer's point of view -- containing up to 32 of these machines. That's a single "machine" with 2048 main processors and hundreds (thousands?) of assist processors. Beyond that you can still do everything an Intel cluster can, like conventional load-balancing (e.g. HTTP spraying) across multiple 2048-CPU clusters. But no one has yet invented a core banking system, for example, that exceeds even a couple of these 64-way machines for a large Chinese bank, to give you some perspective.
No, this stuff is in a different league. Please read up on it sometime before dismissing it offhand. I don't dismiss the value of X86 blades for certain applications, but this mainframe stuff is very different and has important roles. Telecom switching, maybe maybe not. Telecom billing, you bet.
If they just replaced the guts with modern chips, it should be smaller, lighter, draw less power, and cost less.
OK, maybe not pocket-sized; but if I wanted to learn mainframe technology, could I buy an entry-level machine comparable in size and (maybe only slightly more expensive) than an ordinary PC?
This is only a somewhat rhetorical question. How many mainframes in the 1970s had a terrabyte of storage, and were capable of CPU performance comparable to modern PCs? It seems like it would be easy to have that now, for learning purposes and/or to turn people on to the operating environment. I'm not saying I'd run right out and buy one, but it might be handy for some schools to have them, especially in vocational settings. Maybe the answer to this question is actually a link to an IBM page?
Or, how about an emulator? If I can fire up a dozen C-64s and/or a few Linux servers on my cheapo laptop, I ought to be able to virtualize a low-end mainframe too.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
mainframes aren't optomized for that, but it will be the most accurately calculated game of Quake II ever played.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I'm back to working primarily with IBM mainframes. The shop I work in is still running code written in the 1960s, I kid you not... Much of that code is being slowly replaced (there aren't a lot of 370 assembler programmers floating around) with more modern code (database driven), but still on a mainframe. We have other types of hardware used for different functions, but the core of the business still runs on (smallish) big iron. If decades-old code is still meeting business requirements, it isn't easy to justify replacing it just because it isn't written in a "modern" language or runs on "cheap" hardware.
...on any realistic scale. The station you pointed to, and so many other "conservative" talkers (Limbaugh, Hannity, etc...) are more accurately termed extreme right-wing.
Obsolescence isn't 'innate' in something - we create it, and we also create uses for the stuff we use. 'Old' tech is still around because its useful to us, not just on a technical level but at a social, ideological, economic, and dare I say way to spread an individual or group's power over others. Some of these comments just reek of determinism.
Spend some time reading histories of technology:
When Old Technologies Were New - Carolyn Marvin
The Shock of the Old - David Edgerton
Most anything by David E. Nye
Some industries have a tendancy to hang on to old tech because of regulatory compliance and how difficult it is to get new systems approved. Case in point: Nuclear power plants. They have control systems that still rely on old tech, even though much has been improved over the ages, simply because they rely on fail-safes and redundancies that are governed by processes and procedures that were developed and put into place many moons ago, which they had to go through great lengths to get approved by regulatory bodies like the nuclear regulatory commission. In order to upgrade a system even in a small sector of a nuclear plant means thorough scrutiny and a whole lot of red tape to get through before approval, which is very costly and time consuming.
Which is why nuclear power plants still rely on mainframe computers, analog control systems and those big bulky institutional green control panels in the control room with lots of blinking lights, dials, knobs and buttons that look like mid 50's science fiction movies. (Nobody wants to stare at that all day- they'll go stir-crazy.)
Contrast that to one coal burning behemoth I visited that had a fiber networked distributed control system running on a modern server system, with a number of large flat screen panels in a modern operations center that looked more like a TV news studio, displaying the status of all the systems; and changes can be initiated with a couple keystrokes or even through a GUI.
The problem with the old systems at nuclear power plants is that many of the people who know them are of retirement age. As one guy who was tasked with maintaining the control systems in one nuke plant's repair shop told me, "Everyone in here is a grandfather". The younger people fresh out of engineering school who are taking their place were schooled on the modern systems like what's at the coal burning plant. There is a crisis going on because a lot of the old-timers are being forced into early retirement (taking their body of knowledge with them) faster than their replacements can learn from them.
The Mainframe has superior technology. Fact is, PC's do not have good VM instructions, nor do they have extra memory bits for memory 'keys', and lest not forget 'buggy microcode'. The extra hardware assist on mainframes is obscenely fine - quality - but hey, its reliable and trustworthy.
Software. IBM fixes Z/OS, and the hardware assist features build in the cpu mean no memory leaks.
And IBM does not force you to trash/redevelop 'everything' every 5 years or so.
Microsoft does not mention 5 Sigma - 5 defects per million lines of code, but IBM once did. Would you bank the house on software with random 'glitches'. Nope. Like comparing a Tank with a Hyundai.
"Today, mainframe sales are a tiny fraction of the personal computer market."
I would certainly hope so.
How about just for the obvious reason, because it is still useful. Is there some reason we should get rid of something just because they are old?
Sure, I was partly trolling (:-), but they are conservative, in the sense of being Establishment Radio. They're not right-wing ranters like Limbaugh (who was actually fun to listen to during the Clinton years), but they're generally supporting the Government, especially the Civil Service side of it, and while they're not out actively shilling for the Bush Administration, they pretty much let government-fed stories through with the default assumption that they're relatively accurate and framed honestly. They're happy to carry stories from the Democrat side of the Establishment (which is where most of the NPR folks come from) but they're too busy being "objective" to challenge obviously bogus propaganda for what it is.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yet another "technology journalist" producing a puff piece where some self-styled US experts (two business historians, a "technology forecaster", and a magazine editor) give some entirely US-centric, specialisation-blinkered views that end up being nothing more than column filler. Here are some quotes, with my comments:
"What are the common traits of survivor technologies? First, it seems, there is a core technology requirement: there must be some enduring advantage in the old technology that is not entirely supplanted by the new".
Well blow me down, and there I was thinking that only useless technologies survive, while all the ones that are still useful become obsolete. Thanks for setting me straight.
""The rise and fall of technologies is mainly about business and not technological determinism," said Richard S. Tedlow, a business historian at the Harvard Business School."
Which nicely proves that everything looks like a business decision to business historians. Perhaps somebody could show Mr. Tedlow a few of the technologies that we still use today that which been around for thousands of years such as bricks, cement, concrete, glass, ceramics, axes, hammers, ploughs, knives, spoons, fire, the wheel, nails, screws, pulleys, sails, stitching, weaving, tanning, and a whole host of others. If technology was mainly about business decisions, then how does he explain the fact that so many of these originated from things people made for themselves?
" John Steele Gordon, a business historian and author, observes that there are striking similarities in the evolutionary process of markets and biological ecosystems. Dinosaurs, he notes, may be long gone, victims of a change in climate that better suited mammals. But smaller reptiles evolved and survived"
Yet another business historian has managed to solve a problem that's been perplexing palaeontologists for well over a century: the dinosaurs died out because they were reptiles, big, and didn't like the climate. Of course there are a few wrinkles that still need ironing out, such as the fact that dinosaurs were as closely related to modern reptiles as birds are, or that annoying little niggle of crocodilians and chelonians, both of whom are extremely ancient reptile groups, have and still do include species that are significantly bigger than some dinosaurs, yet managed to survive despite this.
"radio adopted shorter programming formats and became the background music and chat while people ride in cars or do other things at home -- "audio wallpaper," as Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster in Silicon Valley, puts it."
A notably US centric view that's a cultural observation, not a technological one. Radio stations in many other countries were still broadcasting plays, comedy programmes, live concerts, live sporting coverage, and many other "traditional" types of radio programme for several decades after regular television broadcasts were doing the same, and the two formats were often broadcast by the same companies or organisations (e.g. the BBC in the UK, or Spain's RTVE). "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" is a well known example of a series that was originally written for, and broadcast on, radio.
"Technologies want to survive, and they reinvent themselves to go on"
If any single statement demonstrates what a bunch of total arseholes these people are, then this is it.
"The survivors also build on their own technical foundations as well as the human legacy of people skilled in the use of a technology and the business culture and habits that surround it"
So now we all know that ceramic vessels of many types, hand-held mirrors, and tweezers have been around for millennia because there is a legacy of people skilled in using them and business cultures and habits that surround them.
"And a change in the economic environment can sometimes lead to the renaissance of an older technology. Railroads, for example, have enjoyed a revival of investment recently as rising fuel costs and road congestion
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. COBOL_RULES_OK.
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
DISPLAY "MAINFRAMES ARE STILL AROUND"
DISPLAY "BECAUSE 70% OF ALL COMMERCIAL"
DISPLAY "CODE IS STILL WRITTEN IN THE"
DISPLAY "BEST PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE OF ALL"
DISPLAY "TIME: COBOL"
STOP RUN.
Yep, entry level is about $300K for the 1st year and $50K per year after that. However what are you comparing that to? That $300K initial cost and $50K on going could be supporting 500-1,000 users. In environments with 1,500 or more end users the avg. mainframe cost per end user is somewhere around $1,500 - $2,000 where the avg. cost per end user in the distributed server world is $5,000+ per end user. You can't just look at the cost, you must look at the cost per something and the total cost for your enviroment. Example: We had somebody pricing out memory on zSeries it was $10,000 per GB, so 8GB was $80K and they quickly pointed out that for our high end servers it was only $1,000 per GB, so only $8,000 per 8GB. I quickly pointed out that we only had to spend $160,000 to get both our mainframes an additional 8GB of memory each, whereas he was going to spend $320K to get the 40 servers in the server farm upgraded with an additional 8GB each. That did not matter, the fact was per GB the distributed servers were less expensive.