45 years of mainframe history since System/360

[ironcoder]

Actually the roots go back even longer, but IBM is putting out a little video on the 45th anniversary of the mainframe.

http://www.ibm.com/software/info/television/index.jsp?media=ALL&item=xml/A393028W95094J55.xml

[ironcoder]

And a flamewar developing between Big Blue and HP:

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/advantages/newtosystemz/index.html

Guess which side I'm on.

Ok, old school HP calculators rule, but for anything else, PAINT IT BLUE!

[ironcoder]

Free (what!?) course materials on mainframe and related technologies and languages:

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/advantages/charter/skills_coursematerials.html

[quadibloc]

I noticed that early in the video, they showed a photograph of the System/360 Model 85. That system appeared so seldom in photographs that it took me quite a while to find out what it looked like (it resembled the much more common System/370 Model 165 or 168).

[ironcoder]

What I noticed was the pair of purple clogs and the KWh meter spinning all dials!

Not really a good film, disappointing really.

[alexlzl]

Awesome, always a big fan of IBM mainframe. Wish they have covered more technical details why this machine is so awesome. It may not be a good solution for Google or eBay, but for large business, they should stop wasting time on developing junk software on unstable servers then spend millions for "high availability". If hardware is guaranteed not to fail, software will be so much easier ...

[itlnstln]

I couldn't tell you any specifics, but we are on an IBM z/OS mainframe at work.  I hardly use it (as a terminal).  I query the DB2 backend database all the time.  More and more, we moving off the Focus COBOL terminal apps and moving to more "modern" front ends.  All of the processing still occurs on the mainframe, and we still submit daily jobs as well, but "the business" is requesting more user-friendly (read: point-and-click) applications.

[alexlzl]

but "the business" is requesting more user-friendly (read: point-and-click) applications.

Well, after spending millions of dollars on "web" application with beautiful UI, probably layoff most of the programmers then move the project off-shore to India, all "the business people" will have is a some-how working UI with nothing more. You probably will have to buy quite many "servers", hire many more system admins to watch them, and make your software super-complicated to handle redundancy. I have seen so many such drama happened (including our beloved Federal Reserve system). Eventually you know what, it is all artificial requirements. What's wrong with the "green console" screen? Do we have to make every cashier to use Browser to checkout at super-markets?

From mainframe, to client-server, to web browser, to grid computing, and now cloud computing, we are just going back and forth between centralized and distributed, and kept on asking: what the hell were we thinking?

Will this world be much simpler if we just write the logic and it is guaranteed to work? Now everybody just keeps on searching for the next cool framework, next cool language, next cool buzz word.

[ironcoder]

I like this new guy, welcome to the forums!

[itlnstln]

Well, after spending millions of dollars on "web" application with beautiful UI, probably layoff most of the programmers then move the project off-shore to India, all "the business people" will have is a some-how working UI with nothing more. You probably will have to buy quite many "servers", hire many more system admins to watch them, and make your software super-complicated to handle redundancy. I have seen so many such drama happened (including our beloved Federal Reserve system).

Actually, it's a little different than that around here.  We hire the off-shore people as needed to do the "grunt-work" (with our folks as the supervisors) and keep the maintenance and support in-house.  These new frontends still use the mainframe as the backend.  The only "extra servers" are just used to serve the web-pages.

[quadibloc]

Will this world be much simpler if we just write the logic and it is guaranteed to work? Now everybody just keeps on searching for the next cool framework, next cool language, next cool buzz word.

And considering that the average garden-variety Pentium has several times the raw processing power of an IBM System/360 Model 195, one doesn't even have to shell out the big bucks for a System/z to get useful work done.

Windows may not like console applications... but Linux is quite happy to be used like plain old UNIX before they had the X Window System.

[alexlzl]

Actually, it's a little different than that around here.  We hire the off-shore people as needed to do the "grunt-work" (with our folks as the supervisors) and keep the maintenance and support in-house.  These new frontends still use the mainframe as the backend.  The only "extra servers" are just used to serve the web-pages.

Take every chance you have to learn about mainframe. It does have a limited career field, however, you will NEVER be replaced by "off-shore" consultants.

[alexlzl]

And considering that the average garden-variety Pentium has several times the raw processing power of an IBM System/360 Model 195, one doesn't even have to shell out the big bucks for a System/z to get useful work done.

Windows may not like console applications... but Linux is quite happy to be used like plain old UNIX before they had the X Window System.

Well, it may take some efforts to understand the difference between mainframe and Unix server, and why its starting price is million dollars. The design philosophy is completely different:

- mainframe: nothing will fail, guaranteed. On Z9 every single command is executed on couple CPUs at the same time to make sure there is no CPU failure. Redundancy is built-in at the hardware level, every level down to memory, bus, I/O.

- Linux/Windows server: let's use the cheapest hardware and reply on software to handle failure. They are nothing but an up-scaled home PC. All the stuff about RAID, dual PSU, redundant network are all AFTER-THOUGHTS, and they don't guarantee anything.

Like I mentioned earlier, mainframe doesn't fit in Google/eBay's model, but it is just the best business machine. Imagine writing a banking transaction in COBOL, you just need couple lines and it works. If you do it on Linux systems, well, you just need to prepare to recover from every step, since every single step is possible to fail (what if disk failed at this given instruction, what if power outage, what if memory CRC error, a capacitor blows up on the motherboard?) I guess nobody cared about that kind of scenarios in your day-to-day life, but mainframe cares, and dealt with them already, 40 years ago. No hardware failure should ever impact the data consistency, period.

Also mainframe has huge I/O ability, the I/O sub-system is completely its own computers, many of them. Thus, all jobs are massively paralleled. Unlike on Linux server, a freaking disk read will take CPU interrupts. That's why you need the latest CPUs on linux servers. The best Linux server may be able to handle couple hundred threads at the same time (my data is not accurate), but back in 70s, SABRE system, every single airline ticketing window console is "directly" connected to the "one" mainframe and processing tickets at the same time.

[itlnstln]

Take every chance you have to learn about mainframe. It does have a limited career field, however, you will NEVER be replaced by "off-shore" consultants.

Exactly right.  All of our mainframe guys are ours.  I am not a programmer, nor do I work in IT, so I am safe from the off-shore consultant trend going on, fortunately.  I play an IT-like role at work, but I belong to the "business."  Essentially, I am a rogue-ops IT guy.  It's kinda hard to explain.

[ironcoder]

They really haven't been able to switch completely off until fairly recently. Usually they find they can't move critical work off the big systems so they wind up running the old machine and new servers. It's costly and stupid and the CTOs have been pretty slow to figure things out.

It's true the mainframe is a declining market, but things are tough all over and not just with mainframes. You have to understand, I've been hearing the "mainframe is dead" stories for over 30 years so I don't believe it. Like alexlzl said very well, there are certain advantages that can't be found on other systems, so the Fortune 500 companies still use them.

There are billions of lines of COBOL running important stuff like financial transactions at banks and insurance companies and especially governments. They haven't trained programmers on the platform for over 20 years so the available staff and jobs are in reasonable parity. The stick in the bicycle spokes is from the Indians mostly and other H1Bs who are driving down salaries and taking up available job openings- in other countries. IBM has really butt-fsked Americans by dumping tens of thousands of jobs and setting up offices in 3rd world countries. This will eventually cause many problems that we haven't even seen yet.

There are many jobs on mainframes, many types of systems programmer (sysadmin) jobs, programmers, operations guys, etc. Some of this is more easily farmed out, some not so easily. There is also the 3rd party software business which is what I do and not much of that has gone overseas, they just don't have the experience and they won't be able to catch up. But that kind of work is also suffering with the general economic climate and environment of downsizing and corporate buyouts and breakups.

And there are those of us who just like working on the best computers, just like Ferrari mechanics aren't overwhelmed with jobs and they sell more Dodges Chevys and Fords in one hour than they sell Ferraris all year...still this is a special environment. All of the things we learned in all our career are still valid today. We build on that knowledge year by year and it doesn't become obsolete over night like PC technology.

You guys think the IBM keyboards and terminals are great? Wait till you see how good the mainframes they were built to be used with are. Nothing like it. I wouldn't trade the career I've had or the experiences I had in the mainframe environment for any other technical job. Now if someone offered me a job as a Ferrari or Lambo mechanic, we could talk it over, over a cup of Espresso...

[alexlzl]

IBM's fun promotions - SystemZ Myth

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