Old school tech still humming along - Mainframes rock!
Fun article at the
New York Times about how Mainframes are not going the way of the Dodo.
Why Old Technologies Are Still Kicking
In 1991, Stewart Alsop, the editor of InfoWorld and a thoughtful observer of industry trends, predicted that the last mainframe computer would be unplugged by 1996. Last month, I.B.M. introduced the latest version of its mainframe, the aged yet remarkably resilient warhorse of computing.
Today, mainframe sales are a tiny fraction of the personal computer market. But with the mainframe facing extinction, I.B.M. retooled the technology, cut prices and revamped its strategy. A result is that mainframe technology � hardware, software and services � remains a large and lucrative business for I.B.M., and mainframes are still the back-office engines behind the world�s financial markets and much of global commerce.
And a bit about how the technology has changed.
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.
�The mainframe survived its near-death experience and continues to thrive because customers didn�t care about the underlying technology,� said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, who led the technical transformation of the mainframe in the early 1990s and is now a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. �Customers just wanted the mainframe to do its job at a lower cost, and I.B.M. made the investments to make that happen.�
When I was at Microsoft, I worked with the
Unisys ES7000 mainframe and that was a real experience. I thought I had seen some fault tolerant systems before but this machine took it to a new level while absolutely shredding any and all performance stats. The design was very clever too as you could replace any of the processor "cells" with another cell containing a completely different processor and still share the memory and peripherals. The thinking behind this was that organizations that had earlier Unisys and IBM mainframes could continue to use their legacy software on those cells and they could gradually transition over to a Unix, Linux or MS Windows base by swapping out the cells with Intel processors.
A lot of very clever engineering went into that system and it was a real treat to be involved in that project.
Posted by DaveH at March 26, 2008 8:52 PM