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.'"

Re:Is it really "old" tech?

[427_ci_505]

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

...Duuhhh?

Had this discussion...

[SerpentMage]

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...

Re:Is it really "old" tech?

[ericspinder]

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.

Advantages count

[NorbrookC]

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.

Re:because it works!

[Itninja]

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.

no built in obsolescence

[apodyopsis]

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]

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]

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.

Re:Fewer points of failure

[stokessd]

A portion of the nightmare of newer cars is the EPA and manufacturer locking you out of the control system. You as a consumer have very little visibility into the ECU. It's like trying to fix an old car and only being allowed to raise the hood 6 inches to work.

I've got an aftermarket ECU on my hobby car and it allows me to see exactly what's going in in terms of engine management and current performance. It's got real-time feedback of emissions fueling and timing. I can data log them all as well as control them all with 3D maps. The system is more complex than a purely mechanical engine, but it also provides tools to let me measure and control the operating conditions of the engine more than I ever was able to in the pure mechanical days. It also detects pre-ignition and can adjust timing on the fly.

So it's not necessarily the technology that is screwing you in fixing a new car, but the political decisions surrounding that technology.

The other problem with new cars is that the disposable mentality in consumer electronics is slowly permeating into the car world. Thank navigation systems, CD players etc. Sure the newer engines may be good for 200K+ miles but that $30 car stereo or nav system certainly isn't.

Sheldon

can we know put alsop on ignore ?

[cinnamon colbert]

be interesting to find out how often the guy is this wrong.
I still remember from the old whole earth catalog, how they recommended these super expensive foam swords - sort of a pre yuppie yuppism.

Do automobiles solve the problems?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do automobiles actually solve the problem or do we make solutions that fit around the automobile? We insist on laying out cities so people need to move long distances on a regular basis. We also don't make effective mass transit. Finally people's egos are attached to a vehicle.

Mainframe engineering is better.

[Animats]

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:Old Technologies that are still kicking...

[Chris Tucker]

Add to the list the wired telephone.

As long as the wire from the central switch to my telephone is intact, I have phone service.

The cell phone is a glorified cordless phone. When the backup batteries at the local cell tower die, so does your phone. Oh, and when the battery in your phone dies, game over, man.

The wired POTS also runs on batteries. Kept charged by the local power distribution network. When that drops out for whatever reason, the batteries keep working, as the local generators at the central switch fire up.

As long as the phoneco keeps the diesel fuel flowing into the generators faster than it gets burned, the phone network stays up.

The phone by my computer is a Western Electric 2500 "desk" set. It was made in 1982. Works as well as it did when it was built 26 years ago. It'll likely still be working as well as it did when it was built in another 26 years.

Re:Is it really "old" tech?

[IntlHarvester]

Dude its the mainframe shop mentality. They cut the huge checks to IBM while telling themselves their precious human resources database is too damn important to be trusted to Dell/Windows when the truth is that its 30 year old COBOL spaghetti code that nobody understands and "that's the way its always been done here". Meanwhile some younger/smarter company is kicking their butts because they don't have an IT department full of old tape monkeys running around in labcoats and clip-on ties.

Which is not to say the mainframe is bad technology. Just that its got its own set of cultural inertia. Let's just say that Google isn't going to be buying a mainframe anytime soon.

Re:Is it really "old" tech?

[afidel]

Meh, the big UNIX boxes had plenty of I/O processors and bandwidth. The great reason to keep the mainframe around is JCL, because of JCL you can be assured that the job will complete in a given amount of time. Banks don't really care how fast a transaction completes, just that it will post by their deadline. It's best case vs average case vs worst case, UNIX and PC based servers can excel at the first two but absolutely suck at the last one, and that's why the mainframe is still around.