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Do we need to bridge the gap? Or, to be brutally direct: Do mainframes deserve to survive in the coming decades?
To be brutally direct, why do you think mainframes should not survive "in the coming decades"?
- Cobol, CICS, Rexx - DB2, IMS, VSAM - JCL
You got paid to go to 6 months of school, and if you already had a Bachelors degree, you got a second one for the classes you took. You went from 9 - 5 each day, and you were guaranteed a job at one of those companies, and if you worked for at least 4 years, you didn't have to pay back the loan you got to go through the training.
I was part of the second group of people that trained, and it started my professional career as a developer. Once Y2K was done, I moved on from mainframe programming to Java and .NET.
My first professional job was to write RPG for an AS/400 mainframe (or whatever it's called these days), and even I don't know what the word "mainframe" is supposed to suggest to the modern user. As far as I could tell, it was just a single bog-standard server rack (amusingly sitting alone in a room that was far, far too big for it; a reminder of the massive bank of computers that used to do the same job) whose only…
Another company that I knew from our user group meeting also switched - the batch processing was so slow, they had to go back to the IBM. Their shipping process just wasn't fast enough otherwise. This wasn't a small company, either. If you're familiar with firearms you've probably heard of them.
You can run the 5250 at 27x132, and if you really need screen space you can run Eclipse/Visual Age on your desktop and have a 'real' environment to code on.
Ok, maybe this is a silly question, but I am a millennial.... Question: what is a mainframe and why would I want one? In my mind I think of it as a big, but inelastic, compute resource. If that's true, why wouldn't I want to use something horizontally scalable instead?
You don't want one if you ask me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be brutally direct, why do you think mainframes should not survive "in the coming decades"?
Asking out of complete ignorance: What can a mainframe do that other kinds of machines can't? I barely understand what a mainframe is or why you'd use one over other technologies.
There are also many features in z/OS (the flagship OS) which are not available elsewhere. Things like workload manager or instrumentation facilities.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be brutally direct, why do you think mainframes should not survive "in the coming decades"?
Asking out of complete ignorance: What can a mainframe do that other kinds of machines can't? I barely understand what a mainframe is or why you'd use one over other technologies.
That being said, I think that advantage has mostly gone away with modern cloud computing and its matching infrastructure.
Ok, maybe this is a silly question, but I am a millennial.... Question: what is a mainframe and why would I want one? In my mind I think of it as a big, but inelastic, compute resource. If that's true, why wouldn't I want to use something horizontally scalable instead?
Mainframe is a really big server, and it is actually plenty elastic. You can divide it into smaller logical servers (LPARs).
The only downside is price. But I think for larger installations and certain workloads it will come out similar with a server fleet.
Do we need to bridge the gap? Or, to be brutally direct: Do mainframes deserve to survive in the coming decades?
Watch this video for a pretty cool story behind IBM and EBCDIC.