Why OldTech Keeps Kicking 339
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is it really "old" tech? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Is it really "old" tech? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is it really "old" tech? (Score:5, Interesting)
A better analogy would be to see mainframes as movie theaters, and PCs as televisions.
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Total Loss of Knowledge (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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
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.
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Radio may some day transform from the traditional AM/FM we've come to
Re:Is it really "old" tech? (Score:4, Insightful)
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? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Is it really "old" tech? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Is it really "old" tech? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Is it really "old" tech? (Score:5, Funny)
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3. People fear migrations.
Lord knows I do, and I have first hand experience on why.
Re:Is it really "old" tech? (Score:4, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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IBM's real product: Peace of Mind (Score:3, Informative)
There's an old saying in the industry that still holds true: "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM." They provide the customer service businesses trust, and that's what closes the deal in large-scale business systems (and brings in a large, ongoing revenue stream). Look at their name: International Business Machines. Their reputation came from getting the job done year after year, from protecting the money spent on applications, development, and client data from instant obsolescence.
Companies remember that IBM
Re:Is it really "old" tech? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Which is not to say
When Something Goes Wrong... (Score:5, Informative)
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? (Score:4, Insightful)
Basic psychology. People stick with what they're used to, even if it doesn't always make the most sense.
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People stick with what they're used to, even if it doesn't always make the most sense.
Legacy mainframes do make sense, though. Even if they're old and the people who know how to program them are retiring/dieing off, they do have 20+ years of debugging behind the code. Many of these systems run highly mission critical banking systems. If some of them fail, worldwide economic collapse is a real possibility. It's worth being very conservative in this case. Even if the going rate for COBOL programmers ends
Re:Why OldTech Keeps Kicking? (Score:4, Insightful)
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If software engineers ran businesses mainframes would be gone because they are old and not cool anymore. But software engineers don't run businesses (if they did they'd be business people) and so they're still around, which is a good thing in my book (mainframe mode
can be argued for other things too (Score:4, Insightful)
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drive by wire system using a joystick is 25 lbs.
Such changes all added throughout a car can dramatically improve fuel efficiency.
Re:can be argued for other things too (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Prius pretty much does this... (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not sure I see what's wrong with the steering wheel as an input device for turning a car. However, there's no real reason why the wheel could ju
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And yet you seem quite happy with the idea of driving a car that you can't steer when the complex mechanical contraption shatters at 80 mph.
People have this idea in their heads that things with electricity can break while things without electricity can't
Re:can be argued for other things too (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Any manual steering arrangement can be made lighter than a power assisted system and more efficient (with respect to fuel mileage) than a power-assisted system simply because the steering then doesn't impose
LOAD"$",8:LIST (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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because it works! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:because it works! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:because it works! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Your unusual sig. (Score:3, Insightful)
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When the tornado ripped through my neighborhood [wikipedia.org] in 2006, I was out of power for a week. I sorely missed the gravity furnace with its power pile I'd had a few years earlier; the gas only fails wh
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because it works (Score:3, Insightful)
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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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Ten years gone, and still relevant.
Damn I miss Byte.
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Ten years gone, and still relevant.
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Still, it will be interesting to see how stable NT remains as it grows fatter.
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Hit the nail on the head. (Score:4, Informative)
- 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.)
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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... (Score:5, Informative)
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?
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I'll take partial credit for that. You are welcome. [freedos.org]
:-)
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What, to stick files together? Yeah, I use it all the time.
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Ever hear of a "wheel"? (Score:2, Insightful)
How about a bottle or a bucket?
Try an even older and more generic container, a sack.
Old tech hangs around because it does it's job and has not been improved upon in any meaningful fashion by later tech.
Incandescent lights might actually exit the stage soon...
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Um, we have these things called hard and symbolic links, and have had them for a few decades now.
From the Fine Article (Score:5, Funny)
I'm pretty sure that mainframe sales are 0% of the personal computer market.
Irony (Score:5, Funny)
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in a story posted on their website, discussed on Slashdot where a bunch of people who remember the old technology are surrounded by a bunch of young people who were born after the remote control and personal computer became ubiquitous.
Utterly. Cheers
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Mainframes... going out of style?! (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
Had this discussion... (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Real Old Technology (Score:2, Insightful)
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"It's the maths stupid" (Score:2)
Systems (all systems, not just computers) have built in mathematics, if you choose one type of system over another without understanding those maths it can cost you a serious bundle. The evidence I've seen in the IT industry generally is that most developers and systems engineers don't understand those maths... Or at least, they don't understand how it applies to
no built in obsolescence (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Though, most likely they're still in business selling cheap/shoddy products to OEMs.
Where's the obvious tag? (Score:2)
Sheldon
New ways to do old things (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
New isn't always better (Score:2)
I'm no dinosaur, but I'm old enough to appreciate some of the advantages of old tech. Example: While I value the portability of mp3's (my PDA has a bunch of them on it), I'm somewhat sad that a lot of younger people seem to think they can compete with what I hear when I get home and crank up my 30-year-old, high-end stereo system. A lot of today's music is so squashed down and distorted to get the high volume levels that even really good tunes wind up sounding like crap. And how many of those mp3 files
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Fortran still kicks! (Score:2)
A lot of business programs are still in COBOL (Score:2)
Fewer points of failure (Score:3, Interesting)
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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 cont
Best quote from the article (Score:2)
That is the answer right there. Not every user is irrationally neophilic. If a technology is the best choice either in function or in cost with respect to the needs of some user, then it will continue to be used.
NY Times misses boat again (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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And that's so stunningly inevitable that the whole article is a poor joke. They've started by using misleading labels for the things under consideration - if you fix that, the idiocy of their opinion becomes obvious.
They aren't comparing "old technology" to "new technology". They are comparing "technologies th
It's not 'Old Tech' (Score:3, Insightful)
Mainframes constantly evolve.
Mainframes went 64 bit before the PC ever did. Virtualisation is just gaining ground on the PC.
Mainframes have had that for decades with Domains and LPAR's.
Whats old technology, a PC server farm with dedicated server per app, and maybe 10 concurrent users, or a mainframe running many applications with thousands of users, and terrabytes of i/o throughput.
Mainframe engineering is better. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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.
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There's no secret about how to do this. It wouldn't even add much cost to servers to do it right.
That is the very problem: COST. The users who want this type of functionality buy the mainframe and run Linux and Windows sessions inside of virtual machines on the mainframe which might run thousands of these sessions (I know that you already know that, but I am repeating it for the sake of completeness). The margins on PC "workstation" and "server" hardware and software are so thin (ask Dell or HP about how thin the margins are on PCs these days) that almost ANY additional cost, particularly one that uns
It has nothing to do with technology (Score:3, Insightful)
"Mainframe" is servicable, supported, robust, high performance, and reliable. You're buying that when you buy "mainframe," it just so happens that IBM packages that in a larger sized computer. Technology is a fairly small part of that idea. To make "mainframe" go away you have to convince the world that the idea is no good, but it's really really really good.
Highly regulated industries (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is why nuclear power plants still rely on mainframe computers, analog control systems and those big bulky institutional green control panels in the control room with lots of blinking lights, dials, knobs and buttons that look like mid 50's science fiction movies. (Nobody wants to stare at that all day- they'll go stir-crazy.)
Contrast that to one coal burning behemoth I visited that had a fiber networked distributed control system running on a modern server system, with a number of large flat screen panels in a modern operations center that looked more like a TV news studio, displaying the status of all the systems; and changes can be initiated with a couple keystrokes or even through a GUI.
The problem with the old systems at nuclear power plants is that many of the people who know them are of retirement age. As one guy who was tasked with maintaining the control systems in one nuke plant's repair shop told me, "Everyone in here is a grandfather". The younger people fresh out of engineering school who are taking their place were schooled on the modern systems like what's at the coal burning plant. There is a crisis going on because a lot of the old-timers are being forced into early retirement (taking their body of knowledge with them) faster than their replacements can learn from them.
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Heck, I was writing a new COBOL program the week before last. Why? Because it gets the job done, with a minimum of fuss. And the code was based upon a similar COBOL program of about 3 years ago, which works, s
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