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Fifty Years Ago IBM 'Bet the Company' On the 360 Series Mainframe
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "Those of us of a certain age remember well the breakthrough that the IBM 360 series mainframes represented when it was unveiled fifty years ago on 7 April 1964. Now Mark Ward reports at BBC that the first System 360 mainframe marked a break with all general purpose computers that came before because it was possible to upgrade the processors but still keep using the same code and peripherals from earlier models. "Before System 360 arrived, businesses bought a computer, wrote programs for it and then when it got too old or slow they threw it away and started again from scratch," says Barry Heptonstall. IBM bet the company when they developed the 360 series. At the time IBM had a huge array of conflicting and incompatible lines of computers, and this was the case with the computer industry in general at the time, it was largely a custom or small scale design and production industry, but IBM was such a large company and the problems of this was getting obvious: When upgrading from one of the smaller series of IBM computers to a larger one, the effort in doing that transition was so big so you might as well go for a competing product from the "BUNCH" (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, CDC and Honeywell). Fred Brooks managed the development of IBM's System/360 family of computers and the OS/360 software support package and based his software classic "The Mythical Man-Month" on his observation that "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." The S/360 was also the first computer to use microcode to implement many of its machine instructions, as opposed to having all of its machine instructions hard-wired into its circuitry. Despite their age, mainframes are still in wide use today and are behind many of the big information systems that keep the modern world humming handling such things as airline reservations, cash machine withdrawals and credit card payments. "We don't see mainframes as legacy technology," says Charlie Ewen. "They are resilient, robust and are very cost-effective for some of the work we do.""
Should be required reading for anyone planning to manage a large engineering project. It's full of tips that can save you from significant embarassment. If you're not managing a software development project, at least make sure your boss reads it. If your boss has *already* read it, he might be worth working for.
We struggle trying to get someone new motivated to learn the technology.
I wonder how the banks end up getting people working in banking. After all, it's dull (yeah, the maths in the software is generally not that interesting), high stress and ultimately pointless. I guess they find *some* way of motivating those people.
Basically, if you're running mainframes, then your business is large enough (heck the individual computers are expensive enough) that you can afford to pay top dollar to motivate some very solid programmers to work for you.
Offer a good package with good benefits for what is in your region (e.g. healthcare in the US, 5 weeks time off in the US---these things are standard elsewhere so other regions will need other benefits), a low stress, no overtime working environment (no regular crunches or whatever), decent work-life balance sort of thing and a decent pay package and you will find good people. Oh, and training, too.
You won't get the youngsters who are happy to burn out on 80 hour weeks for a year who want to hack the latest cool thing in the latest fad tech but with a small chance of becoming a billionaire, but you will get very, very good, experienced and almost certainly older programmers who want a work-life banance. They might have families, hobbies or even just shifted priorities, you see.
You might have to train them up, but that's not goint to cost all that much in the grand scheme of things.
Basically, if you can't get the people it's because you're not prepared to pay (that includes money, benefits and training).
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Looks like you know nothing about mainframes and "aged technology". I work with mainframes. zVM, DASD, DirMAINT, RACF and other buzzwords are in my resume, along with Linux, Java, PHP, XML, jQuery, MariaDB, HTM5, Eclipse and others.
Mainframes are not aged technology. They are perceived as such by small companies and people. Big companies with big bucks know a lot about mainframes. They know mainframes are the most reliable hardware platform on the market today, and I guess it will continue as so for a couple of years, because mainframes were made from the start to be reliable. Other platforms got they reliability implanted on them. Mainframes were designed reliable and resilient.
Mainframes today runs Linux too, not only the "aged mainframe operational systems." And here we have mainframes running hundreds of Linuxes with jBoss. They are about to be orchestrated by OpenStack, so managing all this "aged technology" will be done in brand new Android and iOS tablets.
Job prospects in my area, at least for the next decade, are very good. Half the openings in my area are still open, paying for a intermediate zVM administrator almost twice what a senior Java programmer or MCSE will receive. And there's no people applying!
But if the mainframe job market have a problem, is lack of people. Mainframes are not user friendly, and youngsters are not likely to devote two or three years learning something from the grannies, on a very harsh learning environment, with a step learning curve, when all their peers are talking about creating a new app and selling to Google for a gazillion dollars.
Peer pressure is a greater force than job prospects. I faced this pressure when I talked to my peers that I was learning mainframe and everybody laughed at me. Now I earn 3 times what they do, and I am training some of them to work with me.
As pre-canned software becomes more flexible and cheaper, and talent to tweak it into what you need, simply tossing out a perfectly functional system starts to make more sense.
True, but the annals of software engineering are littered of examples of hugely expensive failures along those lines. It is possible, but it is almost certainly much more expensive and much more difficult than most people in a position to pay realise. I think part of the problem is it's basically a wholesale change in one go. This makes it very difficult to have a staged migration of any sort.
Also, every company is unique, especially those big enough to own their own mainframe. Those are also likely to be old and have baggage. That generally means an "off the shelf" system requires so much customisation it's more like a rewrite from scratch using a large, expensive and probably badly written framework.
Here there be dragons.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I started on an IBM 360, doing assembler coding. Still have the IBM books I bought at the college bookstore. I was always amazed how much it felt like coming up from deep sea diving after a day of coding registers, doing multiplication via shift commands and all the other great little tricks that now seem ancient history. I still find myself comparing manuals based on how well they follow basic IBM rules: you can not self-reference a term in explaining the term, the explanation must not reference other terms that are not explained or that can not be identified as precursors to the term. It was a great machine to learn on.