Why OldTech Keeps Kicking

Hugh Pickens writes "In 1991 Stewart Alsop, the editor of InfoWorld, predicted that the last mainframe computer would be unplugged by 1996. Just last month, IBM introduced the latest version of its mainframe, and technologies from the golden age of big-box computing continue to be vital components in modern infrastructure. The New York Times explores why old technology is still around, using radio and the mainframe as perfect examples. '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.'"

Is it really "old" tech?

[Sloppy (14984)]

I.B.M. overhauled the insides of the mainframe

Uh, did they replace the insides with something old, or something new? Duuhhh.

Re:Is it really "old" tech?

[427_ci_505 (1009677)]

It might be new tech, but the mainframe is still an old concept.

...Duuhhh?

Re:Is it really "old" tech?

[omeomi (675045)]

As is the radio. I'll never understand why people think Television should have killed off the radio. Radio is still around for one major reason: It's hard (and usually illegal) to watch TV while driving. If anything is going to kill radio, it's the advent of the podcast, which in a lot of ways is close enough to the function of radio to be a real threat.

Re:Is it really "old" tech?

[ericspinder (146776)]

As is the radio. I'll never understand why people think Television should have killed off the radio.

A better analogy would be to see mainframes as movie theaters, and PCs as televisions.

Re:

[Artuir (1226648)]

Being American, I require all of my analogies to be in libraries of congress vs. nascar track time (as others before me have likely stated.) Thanks in advance!

Total Loss of Knowledge

[severoon (536737)]

I think old tech survives because of two reasons, one following the other. First, businesses develop inertia along a certain platform. For example, banks write a lot of code that is restricted to run in a mainframe environment (for whatever reason, it can't be moved off). "Inertia," in this case, means that a lot of code and business processes and practice have been developed around that platform. Perhaps even jobs have been created that are primarily concerned with the care and feeding of this platform and all it supports.

Then, time passes. People forget, and people leave. New people take over. At some point, if enough complexity develops and sits over a long enough period of time, the entity that owns the platform and all it supports basically loses control of it. They have no knowledge contained outside the system itself...to make significant changes requires someone to delve into it and tease out the why's and wherefore's of how it works. Either that, or replace it wholesale, abandoning all of the functionality of the code and the stability that comes along with the associated business processes.

If no one quite understands how something works, or even the totality of what it does, then it becomes easier to upgrade an existing platform than replace it. In some cases, the platform can only be upgraded in certain ways that maintains some restrictions of the original platform. And that's why old tech has staying power. No one knows what it does, how it works, or understands the impact of or effort required to replace it.

I think this cycle is inevitable to some extent where complex systems are required to fulfill some needed function. However, I also think there is much that businesses could do to prevent these issues where they are not necessary. I think the fundamental thing that needlessly ties businesses down to old tech is an improper segmentation of responsibilities within the company. Many times, departments and created and responsibilities assigned based not on the actual work that needs to be done, but rather the prejudices of executive management. A work force should be divided up based on areas of related responsibility and the dependencies between those groups, and nothing else. (This is usually how things are done at the low level of organizing groups, but go one or two levels up on the org chart and the concept seems to no longer apply at most places.)

Re:Total Loss of Knowledge

[Kadin2048 (468275)]

I think you're close to the point, but there's a strong issue of cost involved.

In many situations, you can make a solid business case for "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." In many businesses, the mainframes ain't broke, and nobody's in a hurry to fix them. Yes, IBM charges rather phenomenally for support when your machines start to get long in the tooth -- but they have a relatively straightforward upgrade path (to new mainframes) that's cheaper for many people than moving to commodity systems would be.

After all, the people who run mainframes aren't going to buy a bunch of whitebox machines and just cross their fingers and hope they work -- they want support and reliability and equivalent featuresets. By the time you take commodity systems and make them and make them perform like a mainframe, and then make them as reliable as a mainframe, and then you add on the cost of support and maintenance equivalent to what you get with a mainframe ... suddenly you're talking about a sizable pile of dough. Factor in the cost of porting lots of legacy applications, or finding replacement for modern packages that don't have 100% equivalents on commodity hardware (such things do exist), and in retraining or replacing staff who have decades of experience in your mainframe platform and how it functions in your business, and the case for buying the newest z/Series or midrange is clear.

I think most people would be surprised how much stuff that they count on being on-time and correct but don't think about -- things like their bank statements, phone bills, etc. -- are handled on large systems. And not necessarily creaky old 'legacy' ones, either, but bright shiny new ones.

Re:

[Grave (8234)]

What car do you have that by merely pressing a few buttons (or turning some knobs), you can listen to podcasts without any extra technology? The beauty of radio is that it is always there, and it's always updating (ignoring the repetitive nature of music these days). World War III starts, your radio will tell you (unless you're dead already). Natural disaster or severe weather happens, your radio will tell you. Podcasts can't do that.

Radio may some day transform from the traditional AM/FM we've come to

Re:Is it really "old" tech?

[omeomi (675045)]

What car do you have that by merely pressing a few buttons (or turning some knobs), you can listen to podcasts without any extra technology?

I don't know if it exists yet or not, but it can't be too far off. I can already download podcasts to my iTouch directly over wifi. I would imagine it wouldn't be too hard to make a car radio that did the same thing. You could even make it detect when it's entered a location with a wifi connection, such as the garage, and start downloading new episodes.

Of course, some lame-ass company is probably going to patent this idea, and we'll have to wait until the stupid patent expires before we can actually use it...

Re:Is it really "old" tech?

[langelgjm (860756)]

I think the point is that the idea of the mainframe is old, and many of the naysayers predicted that once smaller computers became affordable, they would replace the centralized mainframe model.

Re:Is it really "old" tech?

[MozeeToby (1163751)]

So shouldn't the article be about how poor our prediction skills are rather than about how we cling to old tech? In the mainframes case, we cling to it because the concept was updated and still represents the most economically efficient solution to the problem.

The article may as well be asking "Why do personal automobiles keep kicking?". Because they work, and they solve they still solve the problems that they are meant to solve. And when a new problem crops up, (fuel prices/pollution) the solution isn't to get rid of the car, it is to redesign it to address the new concerns; just like IBM and other companies did with mainframes.

Re:Is it really "old" tech?

[Darinbob (1142669)]

I don't think the concept of the mainframe has actually been updated. The models have been updated though, but the concept is mostly the same.

A mainframe is not just a CPU and it's not designed to be a power house of MIPS or FLOPS (or heaven forbid some naive notion of clock speed). Instead a mainframe is an I/O power house. They're designed to handle aggregated data from many different sources and process them efficiently. There are lots of peripheral processors to handle I/O independently of the main processor and each other. The concept of a special purpose computing machine designed for secure, reliable, I/O heavy transaction based processing is still around; and since mainframes do this job cheaper than the alternatives, they're still around.

There was essentially no reason to declare the mainframe "dead" in the first place. Though declaring certain types or models dead makes sense. The original prognostication seemed a bit like noticing that computers were getting faster with more bandwidth while forgetting that mainframes were allowed to improve as well.

Re:Is it really "old" tech?

[JoeD (12073)]

No. They used something borrowed, and something blue.

Re:Is it really "old" tech?

[GreatBunzinni (642500)]

Isn't that the motto of IBM's business model?

Re:

[Guido von Guido (548827)]

I think you left out a reason:

3. People fear migrations.

Lord knows I do, and I have first hand experience on why.

Re:Is it really "old" tech?

[MightyMartian (840721)]

Why migrate unless you absolutely have to. Migrations should be approached with extreme caution, and if the suppliers of your old hardware can mitigate if not outright eliminate this, then why would you go to some other platform? IBM has done what its major corporate customers want, it has permitted them to continue running their tried-and-true software while gaining the advantages of newer technologies.

In the PC world, we're used to revolutions on the desktop every few years. That's the sort of model guys like Apple and Microsoft have relied upon to keep them going. But when you're dealing with infrastructure that in many cases dates back to the 1960s, the idea of incremental change in hardware and software is extremely appealing and quite logical.

Having just done an upgrade to our accounting software this morning, and going through a number of small but still very real headaches, I can appreciate why the guys managing a major bank's information systems is damned glad that IBM does things the way they do.

Re:Is it really "old" tech?

[Grave (8234)]

Having just done an upgrade to our accounting software this morning, and going through a number of small but still very real headaches, I can appreciate why the guys managing a major bank's information systems is damned glad that IBM does things the way they do.

That's precisely why the mainframe still exists. When 5-nines uptime still isn't good enough, you don't adopt a radically different system just for the sake of change or progress. When billions of dollars rest on the absolute reliability of your computer infrastructure, migration and change are to be approached with the utmost caution, and anything that reduces complexity and presents a smaller degree of change is a godsend.

Re:Is it really "old" tech?

[SatanicPuppy (611928)]

It's an old idea, but there is nothing especially wrong with the idea itself...A stable, powerful computer with a rock solid operating system, supported by the sort of technical support only an old school provider like HP, IBM, or Sun can provide.

If you deal with money, it doesn't seem like a bad idea at all. I mean, keep your financials database on a Windows system? Are you nuts? Keep your finances in MySQL, running on Linux? I don't think so. Oracle on Linux, maybe, but what about the hardware? Going to buy yourself a nice Dell? (pause for laughter)

Buying a sexy mainframe with real hardware support, the kind where they send out a guy who knows what he's doing, 3 minutes after you call, and he's got the new part installed in an hour and a half or your money back...That stuff is priceless if you really really need your system to be reliable. I can definitely see why they're still around.

When Something Goes Wrong...

[BBCWatcher (900486)]

I love this "single point of failure" argument. It's a fallacy. The only single point of failure with a single mainframe is the building it physically sits in. A single mainframe is internally redundant in every possible respect you can think of (and several you didn't think of). It is that cluster you talk about fondly, except there's no (error-prone) self-assembly and no particular management burden required. It. Just. Works.

But if you're concerned about a building failure -- fire, flood, whatever -- you can buy a second machine. IBM will sell that second machine to you at a lower price. You can put the second machine in a second building, you can run fiber (preferably with two separate physical paths) between the two machines, keep them many tens of kilometers apart, and run them as a single, seamless cluster (called a Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex). And, as a programmer, you have absolutely zero coding responsibility to make that all work. If anything bad happens all your transactions instantly flip over to the other site, in-flight, real-time. And you don't lose a single byte or a single customer, and you can prove you didn't. You can also service any element of that cluster -- any element, from software to hardware to network to whatever -- without any interruption in business service. Yes, you can upgrade your database engine version while everybody's credit cards keep working. Neat party trick, that, but it's business-as-usual for mainframes.

Scalable? Each machine contains up to 64 main processors (and a minimum of two spares!) running at 4.4 GHz with more cache (and more cache levels, including copious shared cache) than anything else. (Even the clock speed argument is gone. It's a faster clock speed than X86.) Plus scores of secondary processors -- the main processors only do real work, not encryption or I/O. They don't even handle clustering -- there are dedicated processors for that. You can stuff 1.5 TB of RAM in each frame. And you can have a single cluster -- which behaves like a single logical machine from a programmer's point of view -- containing up to 32 of these machines. That's a single "machine" with 2048 main processors and hundreds (thousands?) of assist processors. Beyond that you can still do everything an Intel cluster can, like conventional load-balancing (e.g. HTTP spraying) across multiple 2048-CPU clusters. But no one has yet invented a core banking system, for example, that exceeds even a couple of these 64-way machines for a large Chinese bank, to give you some perspective.

No, this stuff is in a different league. Please read up on it sometime before dismissing it offhand. I don't dismiss the value of X86 blades for certain applications, but this mainframe stuff is very different and has important roles. Telecom switching, maybe maybe not. Telecom billing, you bet.

Why OldTech Keeps Kicking?

[by Anonymous Coward]

Because the people who are used to that tech haven't kicked (the bucket).
Basic psychology. People stick with what they're used to, even if it doesn't always make the most sense.

Re:Why OldTech Keeps Kicking?

[gclef (96311)]

Or because it works. This is something lots of technologists keep missing. It doesn't matter if the tech is old. If it works and serves it's purpose, the argument to replace it has to be really compelling. "It's old" is not a compelling argument.

can be argued for other things too

[downix (84795)]

Look at the inability of people to drive using joysticks, instead sticking to the classic wheel arrangement. I've seen drive by wire setups using joysticks, they work well, but people just can't get into them.

Re:can be argued for other things too

[Jarjarthejedi (996957)]

Crashes decrease fuel efficiency, however. Just because something is lighter does not make it better. Joysticks are far less intuative than wheels for turning. They make perfect sense for planes, which require more dimensions of travel and it's not that important if you're off by a degree or two in the long run. A steering wheel is far superior when it comes to traveling through 1 dimension (sideways).

Now here's a question for you. Why not drive-by-wire with a steering wheel? There's plenty of examples of it working, I had a steering wheel peripheral for my PS1 not too long ago. If you want to reduce weight without sacrificing utility then duplicate the old interface with new technology, don't re-invent the interface (unless that's what needs to be improved, and steering wheels are a perfectly good interface in my book).

There's very rarely just two options :P.

Re:can be argued for other things too

[quanticle (843097)]

People have this idea in their heads that things with electricity can break while things without electricity can't.

Its not that things with electricity break while things without electricity don't, its that things with software break while things without software don't. Software, because of its discrete nature, is inherently harder to judge safe. A bridge rated for 10,000 pounds will easily carry 1000, but a piece of software that works with input 10,000 cannot automatically be guaranteed to work with input 1000. Any "drive by wire" system will need software (at least for the motor controllers that transform the steering wheel input into steering motion), and therefore consumers are understandably leery of it.

The other consideration is tactile feedback. A mechanical steering system provides lots of tactile feedback, since you're directly connected to the steering system via a mechanical linkage. Therefore, if there's something wrong you're liable to feel it (i.e. the car pulls to one side, or becomes difficult to steer), allowing you to detect problems before they become catastrophic. Without that mechanical linkage, you're dependent on the software designers to judge how much feedback the system provides. If there's a problem that the designers haven't anticipated, the system will not warn you, and small anomalies will grow to catastrophic proportions simply because the warning signs were filtered out from the driver's perception.

Worse yet, the two problems are interrelated. Increasing the amount of tactile feedback increases the amount of software needed, since you've got two output devices (steering wheel for tactile feedback, and steering mechanism for actual steering) and you need code to modulate output to both of them. This necessarily increases code complexity, making the job of making sure the code is bug-free even more difficult.

Finally, for those who are going to make an analogy with fighter jets' fly-by-wire systems, I must remind you that an aircraft has far more room to maneuver. And, even then, there were problems with the early fly-by-wire systems. The F-14, for example, had some serious issues with the flight control systems becoming confused and adjusting the wings inappropriately, leading to stalling and loss of control. These issues were eventually worked out, but the process took years. This is OK for a highly specialized system where your operators are specially selected and highly trained, but it is definitely not appropriate for any consumer grade system.

LOAD"$",8:LIST

[glindsey (73730)]

I DON'T SEE WHAT THE BIG PROBLEM IS. I
HAVE BEEN POSTING FROM MY COMMODORE 64 F
OR TWENTY YEARS NOW AND IT IS WORKING JU
ST FINE FOR ME!


The damned lameness filter has just managed to destroy my joke. Thanks a lot, filter.

Re:

[Otter (3800)]

Hey, it's that guy from Afghanistan! What's Jon Katz up to these days?

because it works!

[wizardforce (1005805)]

The New York Times explores why old technology is still around

simple, because it still works. Using radio as an example, it works just fine for what we need it for and we really haven't found a suitable replacement [light based communication for example] same for mainframes, there are niches that still must be filled with "older" technologies until we find something that makes the older tech not worth using.

Re:because it works!

[Itninja (937614)]

Well, just because it works doesn't mean it works well. Take a look at the Seattle School Districts' dinosaur VAX systems [nwsource.com]. Sure they work, but verrrry slowly. And what's more, maintenance is a nightmare and scalability in not an option. I agree that we should avoid trying to reinvent the wheel, but I think updating a wagon wheel with steel belted radial tire is sometimes a good idea.

Re:because it works!

[jellomizer (103300)]

There is a huge cost in upgrading that Vax system..
There are Hundreds of Thousands if not millions of dollars of man hours put into that system, and programs. Replaceing them with a new system could lead to a huge mistake. Being that this is a school district. I doubt that anyone is willing to put the job on the line with such a migration. And being a unioned job I doubt that they will hire consultants to do it for them. They are stuck between two political brick walls.

because it works

[gEvil (beta) (945888)]

Some things are just good ideas that work well. That's all there is to it. Sure, something more refined may come along one day, but it will need to be significantly better and offer a lot more. Otherwise, tried and true technology will hang around. Pretty simple, really.

Re:

[techpawn (969834)]

There's also the argument of "cost to keep working vs. Cost of upgrade"

Many times I've seen historic pieces of IT Architecture in place because the cost to upgrade/train/retain/etc was a lot higher than dusting HAL every few thousand miles.
If the vendor is going o keep supporting it why abandon it?

10 years ago, in Byte

[wiredog (43288)]

Why PCs Crash, and Mainframes Don't [byte.com]

When a PC crashes, even the system administrator might not hear about it, much less the vendors who made the system, the OS, and the application software. The user shrugs, reboots, and keeps right on working. When a mainframe crashes, however, it's a major catastrophe. It's General Motors calling up IBM to demand answers.

Ten years gone, and still relevant.

Damn I miss Byte.

Re:

[$RANDOMLUSER (804576)]

The same issue had an article on "DLL disasters - DLL conflicts are a common cause of crashes".

Ten years gone, and still relevant.

Hit the nail on the head.

[Ungrounded Lightning (62228)]

Mainframes are about three things:
  - Reliability
  - Availability
  - Capacity (including compatibility across upgrades)
in that order.

Reliability is the absolute must. Dropping pennies through the cracks adds up to big bucks in lost coinage and much BIGGER bucks in legal trouble from the people whose pennies got lost. Consistently total the bill wrong and you face class action suits, too.

Mainframes don't make errors, period. The internal components DO make errors, and the mainframe fixes the errors so the result is correct (though it may be delayed by milliseconds when a bit drops internally). They do this a number of ways: Error detection/bus-logging/stop-fix-restart, redundant components and voting, redundant components and comparison (see "error detection..."), error correcting codes to name just a few.

Redundant collections of less reliable machines don't cut it. Businesses solve the "distributed update problem" by avoiding it: Transactions are processed on a single, ultra-reliable, server. The data is backed up (offsite and often dynamically via a network) so that, in case of disaster, they can switch to ANOTHER single, ultra-reliable, server. But spreading the work over multiple flakey machines is not an option. (They know how to do it with people. But they don't want to go there with computers when there's a better option.)

  - Availability is right up there.

Drop the real-time logging of phone calls for a reboot and a baby-bell's ong-distance phone lines are free. That's in the million bux and hour range. But it's a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of an outage in the trading support systems of a major brokerage.

  - Capacity must continue to be "enough" as a business grows.

Throttling a growing business because the IT department can't crunch the extra transactions kills shareholder value. And this includes compatibility: Thrashing the applications and inducing delays and bugs, just to port to a machine of the necessary capacity, also isn't an option. A business-critical legacy application has to "just work" if the system must be upgraded for higher capacity. The source may be long lost and the programmer long dead, so even recompilation (or reASSEMBLY) may not be practical options. (Even if the source code ISN'T lost it may be in a language that's no longer supported and/or with no experts available.)

===

Makers of non-mainframe computers and their components and operating systems still haven't "gotten it" on these issues. The hardware designs are almost totally composed of "single points of failure" and flake out from time to time. OS crashes are a way of life (especially with the "dominant desktop OS" - which is what business decision-makers see).

The chip makers blew it with things like Weitek's floating-point accelerator that didn't do denormals and Intel's Pentium bug. (Those little numbers are VERY important for things like interest calculations.) In particular, Intel could have recovered from that by immediately replacing the chips with the fixed ones and giving business customers priority. Instead they fought it and claimed that the errors didn't matter for anybody but the users of "high-end games". GAMES? What does THAT look like to a guy in a business suit in the executive suite of a fortune 500 corporation?

Imperfect computers can work for the desktops that support the imperfect people who handle the day-to-day operation. The infrastructure is already in place for distributing the load across them and recovering from their errors. And they can work for the core of a network - where protocols can repeat dropped packets and machines can route around failed peers and cables. But like the EDGE of a network (where a customer's lines funnel through a single box, which must have telephone-switch-like reliability), the core of corporations' information processing is already built on and optimized for near-perfectly-operating machines. Despite their cost they're FAR cheaper and less risky than switching to, and running on, something less.

Old Technologies that are still kicking...

[FranTaylor (164577)]

The x86 architecture

The QWERTY keyboard

SATA (yes, folks, a serial version of the old IBM AT bus!)

Drive letters, DOS devices

Does anyone actually use the tar program for its original purpose anymore?

Re:

[silas_moeckel (234313)]

I can think of a couple major backup applications (netbackup) still use tar when you get down to the tape level there really isn't any good reason to replace it.

Re:

[Quiet_Desperation (858215)]

Does anyone actually use the tar program for its original purpose anymore?

Sometimes, but I generally skip the feathers.

From the Fine Article

[Intron (870560)]

"mainframe sales are a tiny fraction of the personal computer market"

I'm pretty sure that mainframe sales are 0% of the personal computer market.

Irony

[Dog-Cow (21281)]

Does noone else see the irony in a newspaper exploring the reasoning behind "old" technology being used in modern environments?

Mainframes... going out of style?!

[CaptainPatent (1087643)]

With a "Bill Gates" 640k view of the world, of course we wouldn't need mainframe computers. Desktops now have more than enough power to run even the largest server applications of 1991 hands down and it's easy to see where that statement came from.

The problem with the vision is that Stewart Alsop didn't take into account the growing complexity of computer programs. We have plenty of (in comparison to the software of 1991) inefficient applications that require ridiculous amounts of computer power to serve and process everything we need done. We have complex server applications like gigantic databases and games and video servers that couldn't exist in the 1991 world.

The mainframe of yesteryear may now fit into the physical space of today's desktop... or smaller, but that doesn't mean there won't be a need for a bigger and faster one to take its place. That's as true now as it was then.

Apples and oranges

[PCM2 (4486)]

Actually, no matter how fast your PC is, PCs and mainframes are engineered for different things. Many mainframe-class machines specialize in transaction processing and are designed for total I/O speed, rather than chip clock speed. People also pay the big bucks for mainframes not because they are fast but because they never, ever crash nor require downtime. Don't let Apple calling a G4 Mac a "supercomputer" confuse you -- a mainframe is still highly specialized equipment, and I doubt there's any application that you personally might need to run that would require one. On the other hand, no matter how fast desktop chips get, it seems unlikely to me that major Wall Street banks would ever switch from mainframes to PC-class hardware for financial transaction processing.

Had this discussion...

[SerpentMage (13390)]

I was at a conference and at a BOF where I raised this question and technology. One person said that at the end of the day Microsoft will be replaced by Google apps.

I said, yeah sure Microsoft will be replaced like IBM and the mainframe will be replaced. He then went on and explained to me on how the mainframe is dead. I looked at him and laughed because there are still oodles of people using the mainframe and there will be oodles of people using Microsoft.

It is not that Google apps will replace, but will complement Microsoft, like the mainframe compliments Microsoft. Where the real understanding begins is when you know what to use when...

Because it's easier and less risky than switching

[Reality Master 201 (578873)]

First, mainframes have many reliability and redundancy features that aren't found or aren't common in other hardware. If you spend the money, you can get 100% uptime guarantees.

Second, there's a lot of software written for the mainframe that works. It does important stuff, and what it does is probably not exceedingly well documented, and porting all that shit to something new is a massive, risky, expensive task.

Why mess with what works, particularly if the vendor seems to be willing to keep the product line going? There's no pressing reason to move, apart from people's prejudices about the mainframe, and the benefits really don't come close to outweighing the costs/risks.

Advantages count

[NorbrookC (674063)]

FTA: First, it seems, there is a core technology requirement: there must be some enduring advantage in the old technology that is not entirely supplanted by the new.

This is what keeps a lot of "old" technology going. Over the past 30 years, I've seen the predicted demises of printed books, keyboard-entry word processing, land-line phone systems, and so on. Yet, each of them seems to still be chugging along. e-books are here, but, as it turns out they have lacks when it comes to the readability and portability, as well as being usable in many environments. Keyboard entry word processing was supposed to have been supplanted long since by voice recognition technology, which is another technology which always seems to be "5 or 10 years away". Cell phones were supposed to supplant all land-line phones, but it turns out there are places you can't get a signal, and you can also do a lot of other things with that land line that you can't do with a cell. Each of these supposed supplantive technologies turned out to have issues that the "old" tech didn't have. It doesn't mean that the new wasn't useful, but in terms of supplanting the old, it didn't happen.

no built in obsolescence

[apodyopsis (1048476)]

I used to make CD players for one of the tech giants, as such I was in China alot. When I say "make" I'll be more specific - I wrote the firmware.

I remember vividly a conversation with one of the chinese project managers. I was discussing the build quality of a new CD player for the US markets. It had that brown cardboard like PCB that the racks leap off if you wave a soldering iron in the general vicinity. The PCBS, the unit front, the enfire casework was glued together with a hot glue gun. The radio tuning circuit was wire wrapped around a pencil and then "frozen" in place with dripped wax whilst the software was expected to adapt to mask any tolerance issues. The manager and his team gave it a projected life span of 18 months, then the consumer would be back to buy another, he was really enthusiastic about the repeat business.

*That* is why old tech survives because it was built to last, not with built in obsolescence. And no, I never brought a CD player from my employer ever again.

New ways to do old things

[bugs2squash (1132591)]

I keep seeing new ways to do the same old things; perform a credit transaction, store a health record, track inventory etc. Many of these requirements have changed little for decades if not centuries, and new requirements like enhanced security are easily accomodated in a centralized environment.

The original systems created to satisfy these requirements were lightweight and efficient to run on the machinery of the time and easily managed by virtue of being centralized. By contrast, many new solutions are bloated and hard to manage because of their de-centralised nature and the need to use whatever networking protocol was simplest to implement regardless of its suitability for the task. God forbid that anyone has to look at a terminal font to get information from a system - if it's not in Times new Roman then it's just not proper information.

The sole purpose for the replacement of the older systems seems to have been "because we wanted a GUI" to make it un-neccessary to train our users or because companies thought that they could axe experienced network admins and terminal equipment that they perceived to be 'locking them' to a vendor. Now I see that in many cases the management of large systems has been "de-skilled" and involves such a cocktail of technologies that nobody knows quite how it all hangs together (least of all how secure it all is).

Best just throw in more resources to make the IT problem go away, at least it's spread over several bills so it seems easier to pay for...

Fewer points of failure

[esocid (946821)]

Coming from a person who has worked a lot on cars, I would prefer to work on an older car any day. Why? Simply put, there are fewer points of failure. When your car doesn't run right, what do you check? In older models you have things to check which are mostly mechanical. In newer models you have some mechanical and some electronic, which leaves a lot of things to investigate and can end up being a humongous hassle. (*begin short rant* for example what idiot thought it was a good idea to electronic fuel pumps inside the gas tank whereas mechanical fuel pumps are connected to the engine *end short rant*) There may be small variations in advancements in the mechanical parts, but those are tried and true and have been implemented since probably the 50s. The tried and true old technology is relatively more simple than the newer technology and easier to fix as long as it can serve the same function. This may be slightly different for older electronic technology, but I would figure that the comparison to cars would work just fine.

NY Times misses boat again

[br00tus (528477)]

Gawker.com regularly makes fun of how the New York Times approaches a question the reporter knows little about and comes away with a convoluted answer. The article asks "Why Old Technologies Are Still Kicking". The best answer they come up with is "there must be some enduring advantage in the old technology that is not entirely supplanted by the new". There is an enduring advantage, although they don't go into what it is, and put it in a misleading way actually. It's cheap. Some of these companies have been putting business logic and programs into these systems since the 1950s. The cost of moving them from 370 to 390 to zSeries is minimal, as is replacing parts that break down etc. And it works. Sometimes better than modern machines - some of these machines have uptime of decades. High availability is not a new concept for them.

What would be the cost of hiring on top of the existing mainframe admins and developers a team to migrate this stuff to Windows or UNIX? Remember some of this code is written by people who not only have left the company but may have died. Then you have to hire new developers and administrators for the UNIX/Windows systems. Change always creates the potential for problems, so expect a higher percentage of disruptions to the business as you're doling out all this money. If IBM is making it easy for you to keep what you have going, and also allows Linux, web etc. capability, why spend all that money to transition? The answer is that a lot of times companies don't. I worked at a Fortune 100 company that still had plenty of IBM mainframes. They even had a lot of their printing handled by the mainframes, although there were Windows and UNIX gateways into the print queue.

Mainframe engineering is better.

[Animats (122034)]

Mainframes are still around because the engineering is better.

There's no secret about how to do this. It wouldn't even add much cost to servers to do it right. Here's what's needed.

• All the hardware must self-check. CPUs need checking hardware. Mainframe CPUs have had this since the Univac I. All memory, including the memory in peripherals, needs to have parity, if not ECC. Connections to peripherals must have checking. All faults must be logged and automatically analyzed. CPU designers are wondering what to do with all those extra transistors. That's what.
• Peripherals have to go through an MMU to get to memory; they can't write in the wrong place. IBM mainframes have done this since 1970. The PC world is still using a DMA architecture from the PDP-11 era, and it's time to upgrade.
• The OS has to be a microkernel, and it can't change much. The amount of trusted code must be minimized. IBM's VM has been stable for decades now, even though the applications have changed drastically. The QNX kernel changes little from year to year; Internet support, from IP up through Firefox, was added without kernel changes. This is incompatible with Microsoft's business model, and the UNIX/Linux crowd doesn't get it. So we're stuck there.
• Additional hardware support for debugging is helpful. Unisys mainframes at one time had hardware which logged the last 64 branches, and on a crash, that was dumped.
• All crash dumps are analyzed, at least by a program. Why did it fail? Someone has to find out and fix it. We need tools that take in crash dumps from server farms and try to classify them, so that similar ones are grouped together, prioritized, and sent to the correct maintenance programmer.

Once you have all that fault isolation, you know which component broke. This produces ongoing pressure for better components. It empowers customers to be effective hardasses about components breaking. With proper fault isolation and logging, you know what broke, you know when it broke, you know if others like it broke, and you probably know why it broke. So you know exactly which vendor needs the clue stick applied. There's none of this "reinstall the operating system and maybe it will go away" crap.

Re:

[eldepeche (854916)]

Digital TV does everything analog TV does, except it can provide better video and sound quality and multiple streams in the same amount of EM spectrum.