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IBM is a special company that seems to not want anyone to use its products. They sure go out of there way to make things hard to access. But they keep them arou

IBM is a special company that seems to not want anyone to use its products. They sure go out of there way to make things hard to access. But they keep them around forever. Happy to sell them to the right customer. So many overlapping products that don't make sense in aggregate. The company seems to be marketing-driven the last 10+ years, selling all manner of snake oil. Possibly the worst big co in these factors?

api 8y ago
They're not interested in anyone but people willing to write million dollar plus checks using their products. Those same giant customers have large legacy investments and plenty of money to hire teams of people to deal with things that are hard to use. Those kinds of customers care much more about things working for 30+ years without downtime than they care about UX. There's a whole world of solid, reliable, but unbelievably boring "institutional computing" out there that hackers usually don't touch because it's... well... boring. Java is the closest most hackers ever get, and that has more in common with Python or Ruby than COBOL or z/OS. Java is kind of a modernized mini/micro computer business language.
- tony-allan 8y ago
  Sure z/OS is boring if your job is to write Cobol programs but if you are interested in sophisticated operating systems packed with very smart algorithms then it's a different matter. You can read about amazing hardware and IBM's ability to fuse hardware, microcode and software capabilities that keep pushing the ability to solve business problems. Yes, most of this is needed to extract value out of incredibly expensive technology.
  - voidmain0001 8y ago
    Agreed! How could anyone consider Tandem Nonstop[1] boring when it let you rip and replace RAM, and CPU, etc on the fly with no downtime. Fun, fun! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NonStop_(server_computers) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NonStop_(server_computers)
- wolfgke 8y ago
  > There's a whole world of solid, reliable, but unbelievably boring "institutional computing" out there that hackers usually don't touch because it's... well... boring. I can imagine if the salaries would be sufficiently (i.e. very) high and the complete culture would not be openly hostile towards the values of the hacker culture, I can easily imagine that hackers would be willing to touch it.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    But would you want hackers to touch it?
  - tony-allan 8y ago
    (1) These systems were built from the ground up with security in mind. (2) Mainframes are usually buried deep within an organisation behind many firewalls. I would love to see a z/OS system at a Defcon conference. After all Windows and MacOS seem too easy these days. Having said that, I found this... "Follow me on a journey where we p0wn one of the most secure platforms on earth." Quite a cool presentation (https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2025/DEF%20CON%2025%20presentations/DEFCON-25-Ayoul3-Dealing-the-Perfect-Hand-Shuffling-memory-blocks-on-zOS.pdf https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2025/DEF%20CON%2025%20pre...) with a good mainframe intro. IBM zEC13 technical specs: • 10 TB of RAM • 141 processors,5 GHz • Dedicated processors for JAVA, XML and UNIX • Cryptographic chips...

api 8y ago

They're not interested in anyone but people willing to write million dollar plus checks using their products. Those same giant customers have large legacy investments and plenty of money to hire teams of people to deal with things that are hard to use. Those kinds of customers care much more about things working for 30+ years without downtime than they care about UX. There's a whole world of solid, reliable, but unbelievably boring "institutional computing" out there that hackers usually don't touch because it's... well... boring. Java is the closest most hackers ever get, and that has more in common with Python or Ruby than COBOL or z/OS. Java is kind of a modernized mini/micro computer business language.

tony-allan 8y ago
Sure z/OS is boring if your job is to write Cobol programs but if you are interested in sophisticated operating systems packed with very smart algorithms then it's a different matter. You can read about amazing hardware and IBM's ability to fuse hardware, microcode and software capabilities that keep pushing the ability to solve business problems. Yes, most of this is needed to extract value out of incredibly expensive technology.
- voidmain0001 8y ago
  Agreed! How could anyone consider Tandem Nonstop[1] boring when it let you rip and replace RAM, and CPU, etc on the fly with no downtime. Fun, fun! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NonStop_(server_computers) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NonStop_(server_computers)
wolfgke 8y ago
> There's a whole world of solid, reliable, but unbelievably boring "institutional computing" out there that hackers usually don't touch because it's... well... boring. I can imagine if the salaries would be sufficiently (i.e. very) high and the complete culture would not be openly hostile towards the values of the hacker culture, I can easily imagine that hackers would be willing to touch it.
- rayiner 8y ago
  But would you want hackers to touch it?
- tony-allan 8y ago
  (1) These systems were built from the ground up with security in mind. (2) Mainframes are usually buried deep within an organisation behind many firewalls. I would love to see a z/OS system at a Defcon conference. After all Windows and MacOS seem too easy these days. Having said that, I found this... "Follow me on a journey where we p0wn one of the most secure platforms on earth." Quite a cool presentation (https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2025/DEF%20CON%2025%20presentations/DEFCON-25-Ayoul3-Dealing-the-Perfect-Hand-Shuffling-memory-blocks-on-zOS.pdf https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2025/DEF%20CON%2025%20pre...) with a good mainframe intro. IBM zEC13 technical specs: • 10 TB of RAM • 141 processors,5 GHz • Dedicated processors for JAVA, XML and UNIX • Cryptographic chips...