[Hardraade]

refrigerator-sized machines

Bah. That's a mini. A mainframe is trailer-truck sized.

[rarestia]

We just got in the latest from Big Blue: the Z10. It’s not awfully big and is actually smaller than our Z9 was. It takes up about 1.5 floor tiles (~3 ft) in width and 3.5 (~7 ft) in length. It’s a behemoth at 7 ft tall, and our nightly processing for one hospital campus went from over 2.5 hours to less than 30 minutes. It’s a workhorse.

As far as the technology, this is all becoming available on the “WinTel” side of the house with clustering technologies and gigabit LANs/MANs. There are a lot of problems on the software side with that equipment, however, and that’s where the mainframe shines: virtually bulletproof OS and seemingly infinite processing power.

[rarestia]

We just got in the latest from Big Blue: the Z10. It’s not awfully big and is actually smaller than our Z9 was. It takes up about 1.5 floor tiles (~3 ft) in width and 3.5 (~7 ft) in length. It’s a behemoth at 7 ft tall, and our nightly processing for one hospital campus went from over 2.5 hours to less than 30 minutes. It’s a workhorse.

As far as the technology, this is all becoming available on the “WinTel” side of the house with clustering technologies and gigabit LANs/MANs. There are a lot of problems on the software side with that equipment, however, and that’s where the mainframe shines: virtually bulletproof OS and seemingly infinite processing power.

[dglang]

Many of the early Mainframes were very large. I worked at a company which had an IBM 705 computer which used vacuum tubes rather than transistors for memory. We couldn't stand too close to the processor or memory banks without risking sunburn from the glow of the tubes.

That machine was huge and they has several massive air conditioning units blowing directly into it to try to keep it cool.

One day ti caught fire anyway due to how hot it always was.