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> Everything was on mainframes until PCS were good enough and now 'everything' is on a PC, on prem or in the cloud 100% agree with this - as a business, why wo

by lol768 6y ago

> Everything was on mainframes until PCS were good enough and now 'everything' is on a PC, on prem or in the cloud 100% agree with this - as a business, why would you want to pay the IBM support contract costs? As a developer, why would you want to waste your time learning about this sort of tech (I can't think of a more risky ecosystem to invest your time into learning in terms of chance of the skillset becoming obsolete)? I've yet to hear about any legitimate usecases that couldn't be accomplished using x86/amd64 VMs/machines. Monzo has clearly shown it's not required in banking (and frankly, have shown how slow and generally useless the other legacy banks have been when it comes to innovating on top of these mainframe-based platforms).

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
I'm glad other people are aware of Monzo - I'm really looking forward to their deployment in North America. I can't wait to start programming my bank account and not have to have my bank mislead me about what "Bill pay" is (their online banking site won't tell me if a payment was sent through ACH or if it was a physically mailed cheque, wtf!)
collyw 6y ago
> As a developer, why would you want to waste your time learning about this sort of tech Because you want to avoid the churn associated with modern development?
- Multicomp 6y ago
  I had to come back to reply to this because I also agree that modern development has way too much churn. You can choose boring technology like a sqlite backend accessed over the web via PHP and cgi without needing to learn an entirely different paradigm like the shift required for learning mainframes.
closeparen 6y ago
Almost all of what cloud providers offer can be accomplished using plain old VMs, yet people find it useful to pay for higher-level abstractions. The whole serverless thing is arguably a return to the mainframe model: managed black-box platform that takes care of replication, failover, storage, etc. and lets you write code that's relatively naive about distributed systems. A mainframe is just a distributed system in a box, presenting similarly simplified APIs.
jlgaddis 6y ago
> As a developer, why would you want to waste your time learning about this sort of tech (I can't think of a more risky ecosystem to invest your time into learning in terms of chance of the skillset becoming obsolete)? You realize that mainframes aren't just for running 40-year-old COBOL applications, right? Pretty much any code you might write, including that written in the hippest, trendiest, fad-of-the-week language, will run on top of this "risky ecosystem".
- bewo001 6y ago
  True for any computer, so not a good argument. I interned in the early 90's at a mainframe shop, and everything felt archaic even back then. Creating a file (sry 'dataset') is as complex as partioning a disk on other systems. The punch card still lurked under a lot of parts of the system 'Of course JCL does not have loop constructs, how would this ever work with a stack of cards?'. I stayed away from mainframes ever since. Sure, you can run lots of Linux VMs on a mainframe. But now you need the skills for both --very different-- systems. Some time ago, I was involved in a project to replace a mainframe and one important reason for it was that they could not find anyone willing to replace the retiring mainframe operators. Learn about Linux and you can work in fields ranging from tiny embedded devices to high performance computing. Learn about MVS and you are stuck in a shrinking niche.
- lol768 6y ago
  > You realize that mainframes aren't just for running 40-year-old COBOL applications, right? > Pretty much any code you might write, including that written in the hippest, trendiest, fad-of-the-week language, will run on top of this "risky ecosystem". Nobody has presented any compelling arguments as to why a business would want to do this. Why would I ever want to learn about z/OS as a developer? And if we're not using z/OS, and we're using Linux on IBM Z instead (which doesn't work without virtualization), why would I not just deploy to VMs/Kubernetes/other x86-64 or ARM based machines? It'd certainly save on the licensing costs!
  - js8 6y ago
    IMHO Linux on IBM Z cannot exploit its hardware capabilities as well as z/OS can. I think that's pretty much the reason to go with z/OS (aside from the existence of legacy applications).
rbanffy 6y ago
> why would you want to waste your time learning about this sort of tech Mainframes provide the largest single-image machines available today. A single z15 can have ~190 cores and 40 terabytes of memory and can be networked into a single-image group of sixteen machines to form a ~3000 core, 640 TB beast. So, in essence, it allows one to program today your laptop of 2050. That's a pretty cool superpower. Remember when 8 CPU 64-bit RISC machines running Unix were cutting-edge? There is one in my pocket right now.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  The one in your pocket has a touch interface with a web browser and a completely different OS and development environment. As a system, it has very little in common with some mid-2000s UltraSPARC derivative. The same will apply to a hypothetical 2050 laptop. There will be Some Hardware but the software around it will be almost unrecognisably different - assuming we still have laptops in 2050, which I doubt.
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    Well... It has less in common to the SPARCstation or the O2 I used in the 2000's than with the Linux box sitting to my left, but it still has a multi-tasking, multi-user OS and I can still have a terminal shell to it. If, in 1990, I were asked to say what my laptop would look like, I'd say it'd use a microkernel OS like QNX and an intelligent assistant not unlike Sun's Starfire film.
- jl6 6y ago
  Just for fun I looked up the Apple Portable from 1990. It had 1MB RAM. A high end MacBook Pro today could have 64GB RAM. So if we assume similar rates of technology development (doubtful), the Apple LapBook of 2050 would have 4PB RAM.
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    Remember the PoweMac G4 and its incredible 4 gigaflops?
- 6y ago
rbanffy 6y ago
> Monzo has clearly shown it's not required in banking It's not required, but it's much easier to scale up than out. There is a point where managing the complexities of a distributed infrastructure of unreliable systems surpass its benefits and it starts to become interesting to consolidate your workloads inside a single extremely reliable environment.
- leokennis 6y ago
  Indeed, scaling out is more complex than scaling up. Especially when you need to scale a lot. But maybe the major mainframe using industry is banking. Processing many transactions does require scale, but not so much that the complexities of scaling out (ditributed Linux based system) are worse than the cost of scaling up (renting a mainframe). I'm experiencing this on a daily base; you "only" need 100's of servers (not 1000's or more) to process banking data (let's say 100-150 transactions per second on average, with peaks of 500).
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    It's not just scaling - it's the reliability and availability features too. While you can get a very powerful 8-socket x86 with 48 TB of RAM and tons of IO from Lenovo's website, if a CPU or memory DIMM goes bad you'll need to stop it for maintenance.
    - dralley 6y ago
      One of my older coworkers claims that one of the most impressive things he's seen in his career was an IBM mobile tech demo (mainframe in a semi truck) where the technician conducting the demo would reach into the machine and start randomly pulling out CPUs and memory, and then plugging them back in. The display would show the available resources and throughout of whatever computation they were running for the demo decrease as hardware was removed and then increase as it was added back, and the whole thing happened seamlessly without impacting the compute job.
      - zozbot234 6y ago

by lol768 6y ago

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago

I'm glad other people are aware of Monzo - I'm really looking forward to their deployment in North America. I can't wait to start programming my bank account and not have to have my bank mislead me about what "Bill pay" is (their online banking site won't tell me if a payment was sent through ACH or if it was a physically mailed cheque, wtf!)

collyw 6y ago

> As a developer, why would you want to waste your time learning about this sort of tech Because you want to avoid the churn associated with modern development?

Multicomp 6y ago
I had to come back to reply to this because I also agree that modern development has way too much churn. You can choose boring technology like a sqlite backend accessed over the web via PHP and cgi without needing to learn an entirely different paradigm like the shift required for learning mainframes.

closeparen 6y ago

Almost all of what cloud providers offer can be accomplished using plain old VMs, yet people find it useful to pay for higher-level abstractions. The whole serverless thing is arguably a return to the mainframe model: managed black-box platform that takes care of replication, failover, storage, etc. and lets you write code that's relatively naive about distributed systems. A mainframe is just a distributed system in a box, presenting similarly simplified APIs.

jlgaddis 6y ago

> As a developer, why would you want to waste your time learning about this sort of tech (I can't think of a more risky ecosystem to invest your time into learning in terms of chance of the skillset becoming obsolete)? You realize that mainframes aren't just for running 40-year-old COBOL applications, right? Pretty much any code you might write, including that written in the hippest, trendiest, fad-of-the-week language, will run on top of this "risky ecosystem".

bewo001 6y ago
True for any computer, so not a good argument. I interned in the early 90's at a mainframe shop, and everything felt archaic even back then. Creating a file (sry 'dataset') is as complex as partioning a disk on other systems. The punch card still lurked under a lot of parts of the system 'Of course JCL does not have loop constructs, how would this ever work with a stack of cards?'. I stayed away from mainframes ever since. Sure, you can run lots of Linux VMs on a mainframe. But now you need the skills for both --very different-- systems. Some time ago, I was involved in a project to replace a mainframe and one important reason for it was that they could not find anyone willing to replace the retiring mainframe operators. Learn about Linux and you can work in fields ranging from tiny embedded devices to high performance computing. Learn about MVS and you are stuck in a shrinking niche.
lol768 6y ago
> You realize that mainframes aren't just for running 40-year-old COBOL applications, right? > Pretty much any code you might write, including that written in the hippest, trendiest, fad-of-the-week language, will run on top of this "risky ecosystem". Nobody has presented any compelling arguments as to why a business would want to do this. Why would I ever want to learn about z/OS as a developer? And if we're not using z/OS, and we're using Linux on IBM Z instead (which doesn't work without virtualization), why would I not just deploy to VMs/Kubernetes/other x86-64 or ARM based machines? It'd certainly save on the licensing costs!
- js8 6y ago
  IMHO Linux on IBM Z cannot exploit its hardware capabilities as well as z/OS can. I think that's pretty much the reason to go with z/OS (aside from the existence of legacy applications).

rbanffy 6y ago

> why would you want to waste your time learning about this sort of tech Mainframes provide the largest single-image machines available today. A single z15 can have ~190 cores and 40 terabytes of memory and can be networked into a single-image group of sixteen machines to form a ~3000 core, 640 TB beast. So, in essence, it allows one to program today your laptop of 2050. That's a pretty cool superpower. Remember when 8 CPU 64-bit RISC machines running Unix were cutting-edge? There is one in my pocket right now.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
The one in your pocket has a touch interface with a web browser and a completely different OS and development environment. As a system, it has very little in common with some mid-2000s UltraSPARC derivative. The same will apply to a hypothetical 2050 laptop. There will be Some Hardware but the software around it will be almost unrecognisably different - assuming we still have laptops in 2050, which I doubt.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  Well... It has less in common to the SPARCstation or the O2 I used in the 2000's than with the Linux box sitting to my left, but it still has a multi-tasking, multi-user OS and I can still have a terminal shell to it. If, in 1990, I were asked to say what my laptop would look like, I'd say it'd use a microkernel OS like QNX and an intelligent assistant not unlike Sun's Starfire film.
jl6 6y ago
Just for fun I looked up the Apple Portable from 1990. It had 1MB RAM. A high end MacBook Pro today could have 64GB RAM. So if we assume similar rates of technology development (doubtful), the Apple LapBook of 2050 would have 4PB RAM.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  Remember the PoweMac G4 and its incredible 4 gigaflops?
6y ago

rbanffy 6y ago

> Monzo has clearly shown it's not required in banking It's not required, but it's much easier to scale up than out. There is a point where managing the complexities of a distributed infrastructure of unreliable systems surpass its benefits and it starts to become interesting to consolidate your workloads inside a single extremely reliable environment.

leokennis 6y ago
Indeed, scaling out is more complex than scaling up. Especially when you need to scale a lot. But maybe the major mainframe using industry is banking. Processing many transactions does require scale, but not so much that the complexities of scaling out (ditributed Linux based system) are worse than the cost of scaling up (renting a mainframe). I'm experiencing this on a daily base; you "only" need 100's of servers (not 1000's or more) to process banking data (let's say 100-150 transactions per second on average, with peaks of 500).
- rbanffy 6y ago
  It's not just scaling - it's the reliability and availability features too. While you can get a very powerful 8-socket x86 with 48 TB of RAM and tons of IO from Lenovo's website, if a CPU or memory DIMM goes bad you'll need to stop it for maintenance.
  - dralley 6y ago
    One of my older coworkers claims that one of the most impressive things he's seen in his career was an IBM mobile tech demo (mainframe in a semi truck) where the technician conducting the demo would reach into the machine and start randomly pulling out CPUs and memory, and then plugging them back in. The display would show the available resources and throughout of whatever computation they were running for the demo decrease as hardware was removed and then increase as it was added back, and the whole thing happened seamlessly without impacting the compute job.
    - zozbot234 6y ago