181–190 of 204 posts
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Power was used in customer applications a long time ago? I think Apple used them for a while and so did some game consoles?
Sort of, in the form of PowerPC, which was an Apple-IBM-Motorola (“AIM”) collaboration. It’s closely related to IBM’s Power line, but more like a predecessor than a sibling.
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> Credit card transactions and banking software run on this model for example Eh, they can but even a couple of decades ago there was a shift to open platforms. 90s and early 00s, sure, it was mainframe and exotic x86 species like Stratus machines. But even then the power of “throw a ton of cheaper Unix at it” was winning. Banks’ central systems maybe, I have less experience there. IBM did also try for a while to rid…
IIRC the Stratus/Model 88 was Moto 68K chips, not x86? I worked on them for years on wall st. - really nice machines! :-D
According to Wikipedia they launched in 2002, so I guess they were quite new when I saw them in 03.
This is a serious question. What does IBM, in fact, do? I'm surprised they are still around and apparently relevant. Are they more or less a services and consulting company now?
Own Red-Hat, thus major contributions to Wayland, GNOME, GCC and Java, at very least. Have their own Java implementation, with capabilities like AOT before OpenJDK got started on Leyden, or even Graal existed, for years had extensions for value types (nowadays dropped), and alongside Azul, cluster based JIT compiler that shares code across JVM instances. IBM i and z/OS are still heavely deployed in many organisations…
I don't blame companies that already tied up in IBM tech for sticking with what they already have. As boring and dated as IBM tech might be, it's still running a ton of infrastructure, and you don't get to be that kind of company without being solid and reliable. That's what companies want, even if a development team wants to flex their skills in something new and not tied to IBM.
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is it that bad? maybe that is a secret for a long life. I want a job that never disappears :)
Man ... this question hits me really hard. I was absolutely miserable by the end of my years at the bank, and the part that really fucked me up was that (at the time) I could not understand why all my colleagues weren't. Huge generalizations incoming, there are exceptions to every rule, but in my experience there are no nerds who love tech for tech's sake in the banking world. It's entirely staffed by the "C's get de…
Although I probably don't make nearly as much as that COBOL developer over 20 years later, I would be willing to bet that I am happier and haven't locked myself into a specific technology the way that developer probably has. Money is great, but if you actually care about what you do, I expect that being stuck on the same codebase for years isn't too satisfying (at least on code you didn't have a hand in creating from the very start). Too many people translate money into happiness, and I guess there is a balance there, but usually it's not possible to maintain happiness based off money when you do the same thing day in and day out.
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From the perspective of PC building, I've always thought it would be neat if the CPU/storage/RAM could go on a card with a PCIe edge connector, and then that could be plugged into a "motherboard" that's basically just a PCIe multiplexer out to however many peripheral cards you have. Maybe it's gimmicky, but I feel like you could get some interesting form factors with the CPU and GPU cards sitting back-to-back or side…
That's basically what S-100 systems were, isn't it (on a much slower bus)?
Ah, that explains this patchset that was submitted to the Linux kernel today "KVM: s390: Introduce arm64 KVM" "By introducing a novel virtualization acceleration for the ARM architecture on s390 architecture, we aim to expand the platform's software ecosystem. This initial patch series lays the groundwork by enabling KVM-accelerated ARM CPU virtualization on s390....." https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-arm-k…
Z/OS for ARM then? ;-) I’ve been running VM/370 and MVS on my RPi cluster for a long time now.
This is a serious question. What does IBM, in fact, do? I'm surprised they are still around and apparently relevant. Are they more or less a services and consulting company now?
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I'd imagine close to 95% in the US, if they're running important workloads on prem on Linux, it's on RHEL. A staggering number of VMs and bare metal.
(Clarification: I'm not saying 95% of all US company Linux workloads are RHEL, not even close. I'm saying a huge percentage of high criticality (risk of loss of life / high financial risk) are, simply because of support and the name.)
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x86 servers weren't that common in the 90s and early 200s, that was all sun or the other commercial unix peoples things
In the 90s, perhaps not massively, but gaining ground very early in the 00s. I started my career in 2000 and most of the credit-card related stuff I built until ‘05 was targeted at Windows, Linux and Solaris, with a variety of other Unix platforms depending on the client/project. But the x86 I was referring to in my comment above, Stratus, was (maybe still is?) an exotic attempt to enter the mainframe-reliability spa…