7 ms·

The Eternal Mainframe (2013)

128 points by ptx 7y ago

pjmorris 7y ago
FTA: > Janie Crane: “An off switch?” > Metrocop: “She'll get years for that. Off switches are illegal!” > -Max Headroom, season 1, episode 6, “The Blanks” As a callow 18 year old in 1980, I suggested to one of my parent's friends that the computer would be as important an invention as fire. He'd been a hippie 10 years earlier, and thought I was being childish, possibly because fire is so vital, more likely because he had a hippie's distrust of the computer's relationship to authority. In retrospect, he was probably right for either reason, though it took me multiple decades to catch on. This article does a nice job of laying out the case for being cautious.
- jacobush 7y ago
  Important, yes. Friendly, maybe no.
aarestad 7y ago
Nitpick: (2013) The quote by Solzhenitsyn really cuts deep.
- onemoresoop 7y ago
  I'll add the whole thing here: If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? -Alexander Solzhenitsyn
- dmix 7y ago
  Not a nitpick, dates are important for all personal writing. It's one thing I don't miss from the 90s web design.
Animats 7y ago
"The Return of Time-Sharing" - now that's very much real. Amazon AWS is time-sharing. "Pay for what you use". By changing servers from a fixed cost to a variable one, more people have to worry about resource consumption in fine detail. Through most of the personal computing and leased server era, that was not the case.
- markus_zhang 7y ago
  I have a feeling that a lot of corporations don't care too much about their employee's quality of cloud queries. Wondering if they get a sort of unlimited subscription or something.
  - madhadron 7y ago
    At a certain point they tend to start taking it seriously and cracking down on the bills. Disney had to ask Amazon to find all accounts linked to a Disney corporate credit card in order to track them all down, as I recall.
    - nighthawk648 7y ago
      Oh wow so you mean an end to end monitoring / analytical system of Baap/s can generate a company millions upon millions in upstream revenue? I can offer you all the stats you need.
    - markus_zhang 7y ago
      I think in my previous company someone triggered a $1,500 bill for one query and things started to look a bit serious after that.
- emersonrsantos 7y ago
  As the serverless is a return of the terminal (cgi-bin, telnet, IBM CICS, ...) sessions.
- lordgrenville 7y ago
  "We keep inventing new names for time-sharing. It came to be called servers ... Now we call it cloud computing. That is still just time-sharing." - Lester Earnest
DannyB2 7y ago
Back in the early days of BYTE magazine, early microcomputers, etc. I seem to recall that Steve Jobs coined the term "Personal Computer". Apple didn't market it to death. But at that time the way these computers were described was as "micro" or "home" computers. Or even "home brew", because before the "holy trinity" (Apple II, TRS-80 and Commodore PET), no two computers' hardware was the same. A real hinderance to mass software distribution. IBM named its computer the PC, thus co-opting the term and forever being associated with it. But you have to remember back further.
- kens 7y ago
  Although the article claims IBM invented the term "Personal Computer" and Steve Jobs also claimed to have invented the personal computer, Alan Kay wrote at Xerox PARC about "A personal computer for children of all ages" in 1972 [1]. Many of his ideas went into the Xerox Alto (1973) personal computer [2]. The Apple I was introduced in 1976 and the IBM PC in 1981. [1] http://www.vpri.org/pdf/hc_pers_comp_for_children.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/hc_pers_comp_for_children.pdf [2] http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/CSL-79-11_Alto_A_Personal_Computer.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/CSL-79-11_Al...
  - ChuckMcM 7y ago
    A pinterest page of interest : https://www.pinterest.com/pin/239887117628640892 https://www.pinterest.com/pin/239887117628640892 At once time in the early 70's DEC was calling the PDP-8 a "your own personal computer" stressing that its cost was such that you could dedicate the entire computer to a single individual, so why not buy several. This as opposed to the PDP-11 or VAX which were 'department' and 'organization' level computers.
DannyB2 7y ago
It is amusing to note that on mini computers of the 1970's that what we now would call a "floating point co-processor" was a hardware option. Even with the Intel 8086, a "math" coprocessor was a separate 8087 chip. On mini computers you used a different version of the language compiler depending on whether your hardware had this coprocessor or not. Typically you didn't make this choice, but the system administration people made sure the correct compilers were installed to generate hardware supported floating point or software floating point. That tradition seemed to make its way into PCs. It was a while before you could just assume that everyone had hardware supported floating point. Oh, and every language's software floating point was annoyingly different. So no portable way of writing binary floating point -- you had to convert to/from ASCII. GPUs are like a new fangled hardware floating point external to the CPU. Now to gradually become part of the main system again.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Even with the Intel 8086, a "math" coprocessor was a separate 8087 chip. Even later than that. The 80386 had the 80387 in 1987, and the 68030 had the 68881 in 1984. The '881 was the first square chip I ever used.
  - twoodfin 7y ago
    The Intel ‘486 had the FP coprocessor integrated, but they split the line into the DX and SX models. The only difference was that the SX had the FP unit physically disabled.
    - kijiki 7y ago
      They still sold a 80487, of course. It was a '486 without the FPU being fused off, and when you plugged it into the "math co-processor" socket, it disabled the original CPU and took over both duties.
- DrScump 7y ago
  My first computer was an IBM AT-compatible Zenith with an 80286. I bought an Intel AboveBoard memory board to fill out conventional memory to 640K and add extended memory. At the time, there was a promotional mail-in coupon for a free 80287 coprocessor direct from Intel, so I added that for free!
bulka 7y ago
I get overall sentiment, it is thought provoking. At the same time, one of our clients has on-prem AS/400 with only half of CPUs enabled by IBM. Same client moved payloads between two cloud providers and one on-prem option in last 18 months. Same same, but different.
rossdavidh 7y ago
If you marketed it as a "server farm in a box", you could probably get people to start buying literal mainframes today.
- nordsieck 7y ago
  > If you marketed it as a "server farm in a box", you could probably get people to start buying literal mainframes today. Probably not. The path of computing has been directed by economics: cost and its counterpart, volume. There's no reason why any greenfield project would choose to host on a mainframe. The administrators are rare and expensive, the hardware is expensive and single source, and the performance is mediocre. I can kind of understand why core business processes don't get ported off of mainframes: the business risk is too high. I just don't understand why anyone would choose to start a new project on one.
  - Bonooru 7y ago
    Continuity seems like a good reason. If you have a team that has expertise in mainframes and need a new service, it is potentially cheaper to build a new mainframe than it is to hire a new team to run your new service.
  - rossdavidh 7y ago
    Ah, but it's not a mainframe, it's a "server farm in a box"! That's way different. By the way, there was a time when mainframes had multiple hardware sources for the same standard.
    - nordsieck 7y ago
      > Ah, but it's not a mainframe, it's a "server farm in a box"! That's way different. No amount of funny youtube videos or tag lines will paper over IBM's z-series pricing.
  - scottlocklin 7y ago
    > There's no reason why any greenfield project would choose to host on a mainframe. What if it was a lot cheaper and didn't require as many people to manage it? Certainly the markups on EC2 (and related) services are insane.
Causality1 7y ago
This user has spammed this same page five times including twice in the last eighteen hours.
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
  I do not see that. Is there something I'm missing?
- ptx 7y ago
  Who, me? I can assure you that I didn't, but I saw it on Reddit, so others might have submitted it as well.
markus_zhang 7y ago
I'm wondering whether there is a way to connect to a real mainframe, not through Hercules, just to play with it and maybe do some good programming on it.
- lboc 7y ago
  IBM runs an annual 'Master the Mainframe' competition for schools, but also give away year-long free access via the 'Learning System': https://www-01.ibm.com/events/wwe/ast/mtm/audit.nsf/enrollall https://www-01.ibm.com/events/wwe/ast/mtm/audit.nsf/enrollal...?
  - markus_zhang 7y ago
    Thanks man I'll take a look, sounds very interesting!
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
gumby 7y ago
At an architectural level a number of mainframe elements have returned, such as I/O and microcode AKA writable control store. One of the defining features of the minicomputer, and later microprocessor, was that the CPU did all the I/O. In mainframes of the 60s and beyond, the IO devices had their own small processing units (to be distinguished from the Central Processing Unit) so that if you wanted to write a group of blocks to a tape drive you could set them up and then send the tape drive controller a block of commands to make it happen and DMA the data. While early machines like, canonically the alto in this case, bit-banged ethernet interfaces directly. The early UARTS were cool in that you could actually get them to do something with the bitstream to/from the terminal (i.e. buffer up to 8 bits at a time: wow!). half duplex in your terminal came from blocks of terminals attached to a terminal controller (HDX existed in the teletype system before computers, but this channel controller model is why we still have it in our modern terminal drivers).
api 7y ago
The wheel of reincarnation is so called because it turns, and it will probably turn again. The new buzzword "edge computing" refers to the use of computers close to the user to do what was once done in "the cloud." Peer to peer is on the rise too, linking "edge" devices directly together. Voila, PC revolution 2.0 but with new terms. Soon we will reinvent the BBS, shareware, etc.
- devnulloverflow 7y ago
  > Soon we will reinvent the BBS, shareware, etc. What I want back are the duck-strangling noises that the dial-up modem makes when connecting.
- ptx 7y ago
  With edge computing, though, the computing is done under the control of whoever controls the mainframe even though it's physically close to the user, so it's quite different from personal computing.
  - api 7y ago
    For now, but edge computing diminishes the role of the mainframe. This makes it easier to replace the mainframe. Eventually someone will do that. Previous PCs came from chips and designs that were originally built to power terminals for mainframes like the Intel 4004/8008, the 6502, and the Z80. Today's handheld dumb terminals for mainframes are built with ARM64 chips that are approaching "desktop" performance levels just like those old dumb term chips started to approach useful performance levels before someone realized you didn't need the mainframe anymore. ... and so the wheel turns. I think the biggest current barrier to de-cloudification of mobile devices is the heavily and cryptographically locked down OS. That's a software thing, not a hardware thing.
jgalt212 7y ago
The cynical side of me thinks the worst side of the cloud represents another front in the Civil War over General Purpose Computing. https://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html https://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html

128 points by ptx 7y ago

FTA: > Janie Crane: “An off switch?” > Metrocop: “She'll get years for that. Off switches are illegal!” > -Max Headroom, season 1, episode 6, “The Blanks” As a callow 18 year old in 1980, I suggested to one of my parent's friends that the computer would be as important an invention as fire. He'd been a hippie 10 years earlier, and thought I was being childish, possibly because fire is so vital, more likely because he had a hippie's distrust of the computer's relationship to authority. In retrospect, he was probably right for either reason, though it took me multiple decades to catch on. This article does a nice job of laying out the case for being cautious.

jacobush 7y ago
Important, yes. Friendly, maybe no.

aarestad 7y ago

Nitpick: (2013) The quote by Solzhenitsyn really cuts deep.

onemoresoop 7y ago
I'll add the whole thing here: If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? -Alexander Solzhenitsyn
dmix 7y ago
Not a nitpick, dates are important for all personal writing. It's one thing I don't miss from the 90s web design.

Animats 7y ago

"The Return of Time-Sharing" - now that's very much real. Amazon AWS is time-sharing. "Pay for what you use". By changing servers from a fixed cost to a variable one, more people have to worry about resource consumption in fine detail. Through most of the personal computing and leased server era, that was not the case.

markus_zhang 7y ago
I have a feeling that a lot of corporations don't care too much about their employee's quality of cloud queries. Wondering if they get a sort of unlimited subscription or something.
- madhadron 7y ago
  At a certain point they tend to start taking it seriously and cracking down on the bills. Disney had to ask Amazon to find all accounts linked to a Disney corporate credit card in order to track them all down, as I recall.
  - nighthawk648 7y ago
    Oh wow so you mean an end to end monitoring / analytical system of Baap/s can generate a company millions upon millions in upstream revenue? I can offer you all the stats you need.
  - markus_zhang 7y ago
    I think in my previous company someone triggered a $1,500 bill for one query and things started to look a bit serious after that.
emersonrsantos 7y ago
As the serverless is a return of the terminal (cgi-bin, telnet, IBM CICS, ...) sessions.
lordgrenville 7y ago
"We keep inventing new names for time-sharing. It came to be called servers ... Now we call it cloud computing. That is still just time-sharing." - Lester Earnest

DannyB2 7y ago

Back in the early days of BYTE magazine, early microcomputers, etc. I seem to recall that Steve Jobs coined the term "Personal Computer". Apple didn't market it to death. But at that time the way these computers were described was as "micro" or "home" computers. Or even "home brew", because before the "holy trinity" (Apple II, TRS-80 and Commodore PET), no two computers' hardware was the same. A real hinderance to mass software distribution. IBM named its computer the PC, thus co-opting the term and forever being associated with it. But you have to remember back further.

kens 7y ago
Although the article claims IBM invented the term "Personal Computer" and Steve Jobs also claimed to have invented the personal computer, Alan Kay wrote at Xerox PARC about "A personal computer for children of all ages" in 1972 [1]. Many of his ideas went into the Xerox Alto (1973) personal computer [2]. The Apple I was introduced in 1976 and the IBM PC in 1981. [1] http://www.vpri.org/pdf/hc_pers_comp_for_children.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/hc_pers_comp_for_children.pdf [2] http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/CSL-79-11_Alto_A_Personal_Computer.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/CSL-79-11_Al...
- ChuckMcM 7y ago
  A pinterest page of interest : https://www.pinterest.com/pin/239887117628640892 https://www.pinterest.com/pin/239887117628640892 At once time in the early 70's DEC was calling the PDP-8 a "your own personal computer" stressing that its cost was such that you could dedicate the entire computer to a single individual, so why not buy several. This as opposed to the PDP-11 or VAX which were 'department' and 'organization' level computers.

DannyB2 7y ago

It is amusing to note that on mini computers of the 1970's that what we now would call a "floating point co-processor" was a hardware option. Even with the Intel 8086, a "math" coprocessor was a separate 8087 chip. On mini computers you used a different version of the language compiler depending on whether your hardware had this coprocessor or not. Typically you didn't make this choice, but the system administration people made sure the correct compilers were installed to generate hardware supported floating point or software floating point. That tradition seemed to make its way into PCs. It was a while before you could just assume that everyone had hardware supported floating point. Oh, and every language's software floating point was annoyingly different. So no portable way of writing binary floating point -- you had to convert to/from ASCII. GPUs are like a new fangled hardware floating point external to the CPU. Now to gradually become part of the main system again.

reaperducer 7y ago
Even with the Intel 8086, a "math" coprocessor was a separate 8087 chip. Even later than that. The 80386 had the 80387 in 1987, and the 68030 had the 68881 in 1984. The '881 was the first square chip I ever used.
- twoodfin 7y ago
  The Intel ‘486 had the FP coprocessor integrated, but they split the line into the DX and SX models. The only difference was that the SX had the FP unit physically disabled.
  - kijiki 7y ago
    They still sold a 80487, of course. It was a '486 without the FPU being fused off, and when you plugged it into the "math co-processor" socket, it disabled the original CPU and took over both duties.
DrScump 7y ago
My first computer was an IBM AT-compatible Zenith with an 80286. I bought an Intel AboveBoard memory board to fill out conventional memory to 640K and add extended memory. At the time, there was a promotional mail-in coupon for a free 80287 coprocessor direct from Intel, so I added that for free!

bulka 7y ago

I get overall sentiment, it is thought provoking. At the same time, one of our clients has on-prem AS/400 with only half of CPUs enabled by IBM. Same client moved payloads between two cloud providers and one on-prem option in last 18 months. Same same, but different.

rossdavidh 7y ago

If you marketed it as a "server farm in a box", you could probably get people to start buying literal mainframes today.

nordsieck 7y ago
> If you marketed it as a "server farm in a box", you could probably get people to start buying literal mainframes today. Probably not. The path of computing has been directed by economics: cost and its counterpart, volume. There's no reason why any greenfield project would choose to host on a mainframe. The administrators are rare and expensive, the hardware is expensive and single source, and the performance is mediocre. I can kind of understand why core business processes don't get ported off of mainframes: the business risk is too high. I just don't understand why anyone would choose to start a new project on one.
- Bonooru 7y ago
  Continuity seems like a good reason. If you have a team that has expertise in mainframes and need a new service, it is potentially cheaper to build a new mainframe than it is to hire a new team to run your new service.
- rossdavidh 7y ago
  Ah, but it's not a mainframe, it's a "server farm in a box"! That's way different. By the way, there was a time when mainframes had multiple hardware sources for the same standard.
  - nordsieck 7y ago
    > Ah, but it's not a mainframe, it's a "server farm in a box"! That's way different. No amount of funny youtube videos or tag lines will paper over IBM's z-series pricing.
- scottlocklin 7y ago
  > There's no reason why any greenfield project would choose to host on a mainframe. What if it was a lot cheaper and didn't require as many people to manage it? Certainly the markups on EC2 (and related) services are insane.

Causality1 7y ago

This user has spammed this same page five times including twice in the last eighteen hours.

HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
I do not see that. Is there something I'm missing?
ptx 7y ago
Who, me? I can assure you that I didn't, but I saw it on Reddit, so others might have submitted it as well.

markus_zhang 7y ago

I'm wondering whether there is a way to connect to a real mainframe, not through Hercules, just to play with it and maybe do some good programming on it.

lboc 7y ago
IBM runs an annual 'Master the Mainframe' competition for schools, but also give away year-long free access via the 'Learning System': https://www-01.ibm.com/events/wwe/ast/mtm/audit.nsf/enrollall https://www-01.ibm.com/events/wwe/ast/mtm/audit.nsf/enrollal...?
- markus_zhang 7y ago
  Thanks man I'll take a look, sounds very interesting!

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

gumby 7y ago

At an architectural level a number of mainframe elements have returned, such as I/O and microcode AKA writable control store. One of the defining features of the minicomputer, and later microprocessor, was that the CPU did all the I/O. In mainframes of the 60s and beyond, the IO devices had their own small processing units (to be distinguished from the Central Processing Unit) so that if you wanted to write a group of blocks to a tape drive you could set them up and then send the tape drive controller a block of commands to make it happen and DMA the data. While early machines like, canonically the alto in this case, bit-banged ethernet interfaces directly. The early UARTS were cool in that you could actually get them to do something with the bitstream to/from the terminal (i.e. buffer up to 8 bits at a time: wow!). half duplex in your terminal came from blocks of terminals attached to a terminal controller (HDX existed in the teletype system before computers, but this channel controller model is why we still have it in our modern terminal drivers).

api 7y ago

The wheel of reincarnation is so called because it turns, and it will probably turn again. The new buzzword "edge computing" refers to the use of computers close to the user to do what was once done in "the cloud." Peer to peer is on the rise too, linking "edge" devices directly together. Voila, PC revolution 2.0 but with new terms. Soon we will reinvent the BBS, shareware, etc.

devnulloverflow 7y ago
> Soon we will reinvent the BBS, shareware, etc. What I want back are the duck-strangling noises that the dial-up modem makes when connecting.
ptx 7y ago
With edge computing, though, the computing is done under the control of whoever controls the mainframe even though it's physically close to the user, so it's quite different from personal computing.
- api 7y ago
  For now, but edge computing diminishes the role of the mainframe. This makes it easier to replace the mainframe. Eventually someone will do that. Previous PCs came from chips and designs that were originally built to power terminals for mainframes like the Intel 4004/8008, the 6502, and the Z80. Today's handheld dumb terminals for mainframes are built with ARM64 chips that are approaching "desktop" performance levels just like those old dumb term chips started to approach useful performance levels before someone realized you didn't need the mainframe anymore. ... and so the wheel turns. I think the biggest current barrier to de-cloudification of mobile devices is the heavily and cryptographically locked down OS. That's a software thing, not a hardware thing.

jgalt212 7y ago

The cynical side of me thinks the worst side of the cloud represents another front in the Civil War over General Purpose Computing. https://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html https://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html