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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.'"
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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.
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
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 can think of a couple major backup applications (netbackup) still use tar when you get down to the tape level there really isn't any good reason to replace it.
No sir I dont like it.
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.
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...
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
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.
I imagine you no longer work for them because they went out of business because of such shoddy products. I know I generally don't buy products from the same manufacturer if the first one fails in a short time period. I certainly hope others have the same sense..
Though, most likely they're still in business selling cheap/shoddy products to OEMs.
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.
There is a huge cost in upgrading that Vax system..
There are Hundreds of Thousands if not millions of dollars of man hours put into that system, and programs. Replaceing them with a new system could lead to a huge mistake. Being that this is a school district. I doubt that anyone is willing to put the job on the line with such a migration. And being a unioned job I doubt that they will hire consultants to do it for them. They are stuck between two political brick walls.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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!
COBOL code runs in some shops where the source code is even gone! I know one system I wrot ein the early 80's is still running. I left that company in the mid 80s. Other palces you find stuff all the time written by peopl that have moved within the company, left the company, retired or even died.
Heck, I was writing a new COBOL program the week before last. Why? Because it gets the job done, with a minimum of fuss. And the code was based upon a similar COBOL program of about 3 years ago, which works, so I was able to crank out a WORKING program with only an hour or so of work. Convert to Java? Try 3 weeks work, which I just don't have time for.
Why are the mainframes still here? What machines are you going to use to put terabyte sized databases on that require access 24 x 7 for hundreds of users?
If I can line up enough jobs to run a mainframe for 8 hours standalone (yes, take the whole machine and peg it to 100% for 8 hours), just to do maintenance on my databases on Thanksgiving day, when am I ever going to get enough time to do it in a server environment?
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.
"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.
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.