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Mini-Mainframe at Home: A 6-CPU Server from 1997
- qubex 8y agoVery interesting, and seriously nostalgia-inducing, but... THIS IS BY NO MEANS A MAINFRAME. A large server does not equate with a mainframe on any level. If it contains x86 parts it isn't a mainframe for sure.
- amanzi 8y agoYeah, I wonder if that's just something lost in translation - perhaps he just means: a mini "large powerful computer".
- C1sc0cat 8y agoThat was my thought - though there is a pic of a Z series. And the cost as much as a Ferrari made me smile I can recall (1981) when a single 300mb disk drive for a supermini cost almost as much as a 1 bedroom flat let alone the single HP instrument that was well over £100,000
- arethuza 8y agoI remember when we ordered 64MB (not GB) of RAM for the Sun 4/330 that was my main machine in 1990 or so and someone flew from London to Edinburgh to install it! The box was definitely worth more than my flat at the time.
- C1sc0cat 8y agoI remember at one point at BT our disaster recovery plan for BT worldwides extranet was 1 Put test system in taxi 2 Drive to Heathrow 3 Walk Up to ticket desk at the BA Lounge and buy tickets plus one for the server 4 Install server in CAPITAL (main central office in Edinburgh)
- drewg123 8y agoI remember installing 256MB of RAM in a DEC Alpha 3000/500 about 2 months into my first job as a sysadmin in 1993. I remember following the anti-static rules like my life depended on it, since that RAM was worth more than my annual salary.
- ch_123 8y ago> If it contains x86 parts it isn't a mainframe for sure. Nitpick: mainframes often contain x86 chips supporting various I/O devices, much in the same way that a modern x86 machine may have an ARM core or two or ten lying around somewhere. Even when tweaking the definition to "uses x86 as the main CPU" this would rule out certain vendors (Unisys being the primary example that comes to mind) whose mainframes consist of an emulator running on a locked down Linux or Windows Xeon system.
- twic 8y agoIBM mainframes' "support element", which basically means operator console, was at one point a PC running OS/2 Warp: https://web.archive.org/web/20140305172128/https://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=isg2f2b053a60fd5a852852568dc00605f0d&aid=1 https://web.archive.org/web/20140305172128/https://www-304.i...
- dfox 8y agoOn current IBM mainframes Support Element is ThinkPad running Linux. Somewhat surprisingly it seems to be completely stock ThinkPad without any built-in weird interface hardware and the mainframe is connected by bunch of USB cables.
- toast0 8y agoBlame Unisys. They sold my school district a dual pentium pro NT4 box running some sort of emulation environment to replace the mainframe they had been running. It was so weird going into the server room and having all that space back. Thankfully, we kept the (relatively) larger impact printers. :)
- protomyth 8y agofollow-up http://www.cpushack.com/2019/01/14/part-2-mini-mainframe-at-home-the-story-of-a-6-cpu-server-from-1997/ http://www.cpushack.com/2019/01/14/part-2-mini-mainframe-at-...
- rbanffy 8y agoThey continue to insult mainframes by comparing them to large PCs...
- protomyth 8y agoYeah, otherwise I like the article set. It probably doesn't help that IBM's messaging on what makes them unique is so damn poor. Also, I guess I'm going to find out how their pSeries strategy works in practice when we get our iSeries replacement which is going to be a S914.
- fencepost 8y agoHm. Is the site being hosted on said server? It's feeling like it's maybe been hugged a bit too much. edit: Aha, something in the hosting setup may be blocking PIA.