"Have you any experience in running a high-speed digital electronic computer?"
"Yes, I have."
"Where?"
"My aunt has one."
"And what does your aunt do?"
"I can't recall."
Posted on 04/11/2014 2:02:45 PM PDT by AngelesCrestHighway
The IBM mainframe, the drab-looking refrigerator-size machine that was once the symbol of computer technology, turned 50 this week. It’s been portrayed as a technology dinosaur, out of place in an era where computing is about being small, fast and mobile. But in half a century, the mainframe has remained one of IBM’s IBM-0.02% most successful flagship products. In fact, a decade ago when the mainframe celebrated its 40th year, Big Blue even embraced the ‘dinosaur’ label, unveiling the latest version with a catchy, defiant code name: ‘T-Rex.’
(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...
eeeeeeeewww
...think happy thoughts
...think happy thoughts
IPL decks, 3420 tape drives, 3850 removable spindles, JES2, JCL, TOS, ISPF, Hex Dumps (including the hated SS instruction), BALR, saveareas, 24 vs 32 bit mode, SVC calls, CCWs
... ah memories
The author obviously has never seen a mainframe.
I couldn’t begin to count how many clients of mine over the years have had their data on the venerable AS400.
Hollerith card swallowing monsters
I liked VAXes ànd PDPs myself.
“The author obviously has never seen a mainframe. “
PDP11, is not that big. A VAX 9000 is perhaps three fridges in a row, so yeah, they are not all fridge-size.
Add in the peripheral stuff and cooling and the suspended floor, and the bulk goes way up!
The clouds are filled with dinosaurs.
Now there is HTML and XML.
The more things change...
There are still jobs mainframes do that servers can’t. Or that nobody in his right mind would want them doing. And the more powerful servers get, the more like mainframes they become, until the distinction is nominal.
"Have you any experience in running a high-speed digital electronic computer?"
"Yes, I have."
"Where?"
"My aunt has one."
"And what does your aunt do?"
"I can't recall."
I loved going through core dumps and coding in BAL. I got good at debugging that hex code but there was a lot of stress to get everything fixed fast. Kinda miss some of it but time moves on.
I almost got my shawl caught in the card reader. Lucky it wasn't my hair. Some jams, not too bad.
Remember the long shelf with the books? I confess I had to learn with a dumbed down version . . .
160K bytes of core! Multiple high-density tape drives. I liked autocoder. I started later that decade. Used to have to walk five miles through knee-deep snow carrying boxes of (2000 IIRC)punch cards to the machine room and carry back stacks of printouts from yesterday's runs.
“There are AS400’s all over the place. The wholesale distribution and transportation industries are just crawling with them.”
Hey! I was an AS/400 SME. Lay off the old girl. She did everything well.
Honestly I don’t miss it. I liked Fortran and some Cobol. As an engineer we didn’t use cobol - business school did - but when I was at AT+T during y2k work I was going through their cobol code and dealing with making sure year dates were handled correctly.
Obsolete language, obsolete computer, obsolete olde engineer....good thing we are all happily retired.
PDPs and VAXes aren’t “mainframes”, they’re minicomputers. Mainframes filled buildings.
or has a clue about what one is...
Typical low-information journalism/blogging
It is nice to know there are people who understand the term “floor sort” still around....we know it related to punched cards. Others,not so much.
The last operational VAX I ran into was at scetv in the mid 90s. No one missed it when it was shut down.
There is a VAX on some virtual machines where I am though.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.