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Mainframes Are Having a Moment

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Re: Mainframes Are Having a Moment

#21

Post by Zenst »

eggy wrote: post #4

I used to work at an environmental law firm in downtown Manhattan and accounting and other core financial systems were running on a VAX OpenVMS mainframe, and the document creation and storage was on PCs over a Token Ring, Banyan VINES network. The DOD was using VINES at the time. Memories of playing DOOM in 1994 downloaded from an FTP server somewhere while working the night shift to make backups on huge tape cartri…

I lived thru that era and in all that time, still managed to never encounter "Banyan VINES", and it was always some network driver that many knew of as What the heck is that crazy thing. To which somebody would say, oh some banks use it.

Though encountering Token Ring at a company in early 2000, that was...interesting. Though dare say, that somewhere out there in the world, a token ring network still exists and is running even as I type. Legacy sure does have some strange corners when it comes to many walks of life.

Re: Mainframes Are Having a Moment

#22

Post by Zenst »

tgflynn wrote: post #7
eggy wrote: post #4

I used to work at an environmental law firm in downtown Manhattan and accounting and other core financial systems were running on a VAX OpenVMS mainframe, and the document creation and storage was on PCs over a Token Ring, Banyan VINES network. The DOD was using VINES at the time. Memories of playing DOOM in 1994 downloaded from an FTP server somewhere while working the night shift to make backups on huge tape cartri…

VAX's were minicomputers, not mainframes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX_9000 "The VAX 9000, code named Aridus or Aquarius, was a family of supercomputer and mainframe computers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) using processors implementing the VAX instruction set architecture (ISA)."

Re: Mainframes Are Having a Moment

#23

Post by Twisell »

rtempaccount1 wrote: post #15
djohnston wrote: post #6

is the inertia of rewriting these systems in a modern stack so great that it's cheaper to keep finding COBOL specialists forever? why not just sit down and rewrite these systems?

In many cases (e.g. banks) these systems have been running for decades, they're often badly documented and have had a lot of fixes applied for issues that arise. Re-writing that, is going to be a nightmare, as you've got no spec. to work from and mistakes may not show up immediately (think monthly or annual payment processes) It's a very high risk endevour with little immediate reward for the team doing it. If it goe…

Same logic apply to climate change issues.

There is little immediate reward so let this dumpster fire explode on our kids...

It doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good logic. We desperately need more long term thinking.

Re: Mainframes Are Having a Moment

#24

Post by wyldfire »

IMO the hard part isn't learning COBOL -- that's just another programming language. It's learning the whole operating environment that comes with it -- mainframes. Stuff like JCL, EBCDIC, PDS. I did this for a year or so back in 1999. It felt very ancient back then. If you invest your time in gaining expertise with these technologies, you are not doing your career any favors.

Re: Mainframes Are Having a Moment

#25

Post by pjmlp »

cultus wrote: post #8
djohnston wrote: post #6

is the inertia of rewriting these systems in a modern stack so great that it's cheaper to keep finding COBOL specialists forever? why not just sit down and rewrite these systems?

COBOL is unstructured. It doesn't even have functions. When you've got some million+ line tangled mass that has all kinds of undocumented behavior, it's really better just to add more duct tape and punt it off to the poor bastard who actually has to fix it in 20 years.

Since 1985 that COBOL can be structured, and since 2002 object oriented as well, with the latest ISO update being done in 2014

Besides compiling to native code, there are compilers that target JVM and CLR as well.

Re: Mainframes Are Having a Moment

#26

Post by analognoise »

Twisell wrote: post #23
rtempaccount1 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many cases (e.g. banks) these systems have been running for decades, they're often badly documented and have had a lot of fixes applied for issues that arise. Re-writing that, is going to be a nightmare, as you've got no spec. to work from and mistakes may not show up immediately (think monthly or annual payment processes) It's a very high risk endevour with little immediate reward for the team doing it. If it goe…

Same logic apply to climate change issues. There is little immediate reward so let this dumpster fire explode on our kids... It doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good logic. We desperately need more long term thinking.

Counterpoint: a system that runs for 20, 30, 40 years without any serious downtime is the definition of long term thinking.

Re: Mainframes Are Having a Moment

#27

Post by vageli »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #3

The surge in demand is being driven almost entirely by state unemployment systems. Most of these systems haven't seen a surge in unemployment claims since the 2009 recession and haven't had to change the underlying rules governing eligibility in even longer. Once the systems are patched and/or the surge in new claims subsides, 90% of this sudden demand for "Cobalt programmers" will evaporate. It's one thing for retir…

> The surge in demand is being driven almost entirely by state unemployment systems. Most of these systems haven't seen a surge in unemployment claims since the 2009 recession and haven't had to change the underlying rules governing eligibility in even longer. Once the systems are patched and/or the surge in new claims subsides, 90% of this sudden demand for "Cobalt programmers" will evaporate.

I generally agree but I also believe that this whole exercise might be an impetus for some states to migrate these services to more modern languages to prevent this type of crisis in the future.

Re: Mainframes Are Having a Moment

#28

Post by scottlocklin »

rtempaccount1 wrote: post #14
heisenbit wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not only lay offs it is also retirements. And the pressure is mounting with baby boomers gone soon. I was once in a discussion taking over the maintenance of a system and the picture was grim. The crew running the system was so thin it was hard to imagine them having the time handing it over. Besides they barely understood all the details as the system had been build by people 30 years ago all gone a long time…

I was at a talk about mainframe security recently where the state of play with one company was, there were three users in their admins group for the mainframe, two had retired, and the third was past retirement age... When you combine retirements with decades of under-documented code doing critical functions, it's not a recipe for good long term success...

I dunno; rewriting it in some shit tier EC2 FunNewLang framework that changes every year doesn't sound like a recipe for long term success either.

When I look at how mainframes work, and how "clouds" work, I wonder at how imbecilic IBM management (or one of their competitors) must have been to not capture that value in the first place.

Re: Mainframes Are Having a Moment

#29

Post by annoyingnoob »

Mainframes - the original cloud computers.

I started on mini-mainframes but then worked mostly with networks of PCs. The old mainframes guys used to say 'just you wait the pendulum will swing back to centralized computing'. In the age of cloud computing they were right, and those mainframes are still there too.

Re: Mainframes Are Having a Moment

#30

Post by hvs »

eggy wrote: post #4

I used to work at an environmental law firm in downtown Manhattan and accounting and other core financial systems were running on a VAX OpenVMS mainframe, and the document creation and storage was on PCs over a Token Ring, Banyan VINES network. The DOD was using VINES at the time. Memories of playing DOOM in 1994 downloaded from an FTP server somewhere while working the night shift to make backups on huge tape cartri…

VMS's command line is... verbose. It has nice completion and is well documented, though. And you can see where the '/' style of parameters came from.

e.g.

    DIR/SINCE="1-FEB-1994 17:00"
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