41–48 of 48 posts
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Can you give an example?
Having dedicated computers to control peripherals (like a RAID controller or a network card). To be fair, Atari and Commodore computers already had that.
And the marvelous 1403 printer would often be driven by a 1401.
Just, why...
> Part of the reason I took the job was the opportunity to get paid to work on compilers, but also because I have a fascination with older computer technology. It may be worth re-reading the article.
Still, mainframes...
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Actually, if the prices are pre-agreed, it's a sweet deal. If I have a big box serving my users, being able to enable additional on premises capacity in minutes is nice. Last time I did it, Dell took several weeks to deliver the new machine.
We didn't try but being speaking with the vendor it seemed that enabling extra cores could take about a week from raising a purchase order to the activation code coming through. Maybe larger customers who run hundreds of these may have a quicker turn around time dealing directly with IBM. And it's not that IBM deliver an entire server like in your case. For most practical applications, it's merely the case of adding…
That was in the early 90's and a lot could have changed since then.
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Mainframe is possibly the most offshored field there is in enterprise technology. There are masses of roles in India and to a lesser extent China and Phillipines where is offers a stable decent paying career for these countries. That's where the base-line and critical mass of roles are.
Very true. Because these skills are in high demand, my experience has been that employee turnover in the mainframe sector offshore is extremely high. We had a tremendous problem retaining offshore mainframers through the big BPO companies like Wipro, Cognizant, US Technologies, etc. Go through the effort to train them up, and they would get poached in no time because their skills were in such high demand, and the tra…
I know/do banking with staff in China, around 300 mainframe engineers, with average tenure around 5 years, which is miles ahead of India. If you'd like pointers for mainframe in China, drop me a mail.
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Not necessarily rediscovering, just re-implementing.
Ha, ha, no. I worked as a CPU logic designer on several mainframes of different architectures before moving to Sili Valley. The "look what I just invented" arrogance I encountered astounded me. When I said something like: "You know, Seymour Cray invented that around 1959, right?" the cognitive dissonance was more than they could handle -- I was usually ignored. So, no, they aren't re-implementing, they are genuinely…
What exactly is a "mainframe" in a modern sense? I thought it exclusively referred to old-fashioned big iron. Is it a cluster? Or are we actually talking about quarter-century-old monoliths running ancient, indispensable code?
And has a Golang Port !!! "Building Go for Linux on z System" https://github.com/linux-on-ibm-z/docs/wiki/Building-Go
> The HostBridge JavaScript Engine (HB.js) is server-side JavaScript for CICS® applications and IBM z Systems™ data assets
> HB.js runs inside CICS and supports:
> CICS terminal-oriented (visual) transactions (Orchestrate CICS terminal-oriented transaction micro flows as single services)
> BMS, non-BMS, 3270, and CA application types
> COMMAREA (non-visual) programs (Orchestrate and aggregate transactions, programs (e.g., COMMAREA), and data into single composite services)
> DB2®, VSAM™, DL/I, Datacom®, and other data assets
> Connectivity via HTTP, LINK/EXCI, Enhanced WebSphere MQ Extended Multi-Region Operation (MRO)
https://www.hostbridge.com/index.php/products/javascript-web...
Curious about his point about virtualisation; sure you can't run a VM locally but those mainframe OSs have had excellent support for VMs since the 1960s and are still in many ways far ahead of more mainstream hypervisors.
He was talking about local development environment.