4 ms·

Bailing out of the mainframe industry (1984)

39 points by luu 7y ago

tyingq 7y ago
And now we're back to building stuff from a fixed set of blessed components from a couple of giant vendors :)
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Cloud computing with the browser as thin terminal, and around the circle they go. The irony is getting one of those rich clients for microservices hosted on IBM and Unisys mainframes, written in Cobol, NEWP, RPG.
  - cstross 7y ago
    The "wheel of reincarnation" is a thing in multiple sub-fields of computing: where there are two approaches to an architectural solution, an arms race between competing models often develops. (In the 1960s-2000s in computer graphics it was a competition between dedicated GPU hardware -- e.g. Evans and Sutherland, Silicon Graphics -- and throw lots of CPUs at the problem and solve it in code. That race was ultimately run by the masses of GPUs thanks to Moore's Law, but for a while there was a competing model where commodity CPUs and software could undercut on price. Similarly: departmental minicomputers, corporate-wide mainframe, and feral PCs roaming the desktop is a similar story of competing models.)
combatentropy 7y ago
This sounds like a classic case of the Innovator's Dilemma. The ascendance of the personal computer in the 1980s upset many large companies. I was surprised how old some of them were: 1879 - NCR 1886 - Burroughs 1906 - Honeywell 1910 - Sperry 1911 - IBM
- redis_mlc 7y ago
  > This sounds like a classic case of the Innovator's Dilemma. Yes, but there's other factors too. 1. Need special flooring, cooling and power. 2. Expensive enough for company instead of departmental budget approval 3. Departments already have PCs to run Excel, etc. Having said that, I had a tour of the State of Alaska data center once. Standing next to the 6' tall IBM mainframe and Shark storage array was an eye-opening experience. The potential to have that level of support and redundancy with that amount of storage was really unmatched before AWS.
- simonh 7y ago
  Not mainframes I know, but I saw this happening to Prime Computer back in the early 90s. We had a Prime at Wolverhampton Poly (UK) when I was a student, and my first job was at a Forestry Commission Research Station down in Surrey and they had a Prime as well. I used to come in early to change the 1/2" backup tape spools. That company did everything they could to stay relevant. I went on a training course on their new x86 Unix boxes, but we ended up buying from SUN. The late 80s/90s saw a lot of odd computing architectures and ideosyncratic systems. I worked on a Pick system once, with a dictionary based file system. PCs and Unix paved over everything between them by the end of the 90s though. Sorry, rambling.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  What I found interesting is mosts of these types of company knew what was happening, sometimes they were even at the forefront of the changes (IBM with the PC, Kodak with digital cameras) yet they were completely unable to respond to it. I worked for or with printer companies for the early part of my career, they all went through the same struggles and few of them exist now.

39 points by luu 7y ago

tyingq 7y ago

And now we're back to building stuff from a fixed set of blessed components from a couple of giant vendors :)

pjmlp 7y ago
Cloud computing with the browser as thin terminal, and around the circle they go. The irony is getting one of those rich clients for microservices hosted on IBM and Unisys mainframes, written in Cobol, NEWP, RPG.
- cstross 7y ago
  The "wheel of reincarnation" is a thing in multiple sub-fields of computing: where there are two approaches to an architectural solution, an arms race between competing models often develops. (In the 1960s-2000s in computer graphics it was a competition between dedicated GPU hardware -- e.g. Evans and Sutherland, Silicon Graphics -- and throw lots of CPUs at the problem and solve it in code. That race was ultimately run by the masses of GPUs thanks to Moore's Law, but for a while there was a competing model where commodity CPUs and software could undercut on price. Similarly: departmental minicomputers, corporate-wide mainframe, and feral PCs roaming the desktop is a similar story of competing models.)

combatentropy 7y ago

This sounds like a classic case of the Innovator's Dilemma. The ascendance of the personal computer in the 1980s upset many large companies. I was surprised how old some of them were: 1879 - NCR 1886 - Burroughs 1906 - Honeywell 1910 - Sperry 1911 - IBM

redis_mlc 7y ago
> This sounds like a classic case of the Innovator's Dilemma. Yes, but there's other factors too. 1. Need special flooring, cooling and power. 2. Expensive enough for company instead of departmental budget approval 3. Departments already have PCs to run Excel, etc. Having said that, I had a tour of the State of Alaska data center once. Standing next to the 6' tall IBM mainframe and Shark storage array was an eye-opening experience. The potential to have that level of support and redundancy with that amount of storage was really unmatched before AWS.
simonh 7y ago
Not mainframes I know, but I saw this happening to Prime Computer back in the early 90s. We had a Prime at Wolverhampton Poly (UK) when I was a student, and my first job was at a Forestry Commission Research Station down in Surrey and they had a Prime as well. I used to come in early to change the 1/2" backup tape spools. That company did everything they could to stay relevant. I went on a training course on their new x86 Unix boxes, but we ended up buying from SUN. The late 80s/90s saw a lot of odd computing architectures and ideosyncratic systems. I worked on a Pick system once, with a dictionary based file system. PCs and Unix paved over everything between them by the end of the 90s though. Sorry, rambling.
tonyedgecombe 7y ago
What I found interesting is mosts of these types of company knew what was happening, sometimes they were even at the forefront of the changes (IBM with the PC, Kodak with digital cameras) yet they were completely unable to respond to it. I worked for or with printer companies for the early part of my career, they all went through the same struggles and few of them exist now.