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I used to fix compilers for IBM and we worked on (older versions of) these machines. They were awesome! Coming to the PC business after using mainframes was a s

I used to fix compilers for IBM and we worked on (older versions of) these machines. They were awesome! Coming to the PC business after using mainframes was a sad joke. You should see what it's like working with VM, IBM's virtualization environment. It was amazing and that was 25 years ago.

pm90 5y ago
It’s interesting that IBM wasn’t sooner to the cloud with superior virtualization technology.
- mimixco 5y ago
  Just like the PC, they didn't realize it was important until it was too late. In my experience, mainframes are a superior way to develop and run every kind of software. The PC is a crippled, stupid stepchild by any reasonable comparison. Just the idea that you need to setup and manage 1,000 of them to come close to a small mainframe is ludicrous. Who needs the overhead and maintenance? Sure, you can swap machines and distribute loads between them, but who wants to? Yuck. It's a lot nicer to have that stuff handled automatically. Also like the PC, IBM didn't realize that their boxes could be used for this new funky thing called the internet. Talk about blind-sighted. Their first web product was an abomination they inherited from their purchase of Lotus. It didn't work and produced unusable websites, boding poorly for IBM's entry into that market which was already taking off with Active Server Pages and XMLHTTP. If IBM had loudly (and correctly) proclaimed that mainframes were the place to run web services, everyone and their mother would be running mainframes right now instead of Linux boxes. IBM's eventual realization of this led to their purchase of Red Hat!
  - azinman2 5y ago
    Well, not just mainframes generally, but if they created AWS on mainframes and hosted them… that would have made it accessible for startups.
    - mimixco 5y ago
      It was so simple internally, they could have ported those tools to a GUI. But GUI's and user interfaces are not something IBM has ever done well (other than command line ones).
      - azinman2 5y ago
        I would argue neither has AWS yet…
      - ngcc_hk 5y ago
        The organisation is also in the way. Both in Ibm and for those teams using ibm. Very bureaucratic and like token ring over management kill. Good and have its niche. But murder by the liberal Ethernet.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    > If IBM had loudly (and correctly) proclaimed that mainframes were the place to run web services, everyone and their mother would be running mainframes right now instead of Linux boxes. No, they wouldn't. I could take one Linux box, get a domain name, and have a web server. I wouldn't be able to afford a mainframe, though. And if your alternative is renting a fraction of a mainframe, the answer is no. No, I will not trade a Linux box that I control for renting a piece of a mainframe that I don't control. Just no.
    - mimixco 5y ago
      For enterprise is what I meant. Not for individuals.
- mimixco 5y ago
  Sidenote: In VM, you could spawn a new machines with "physical" storage or drives (Nothing was physical on the mainframe; everything is faked just for you! Awesome.) by typing a single command at the command prompt! If you needed to fix a bug in some combination of operating system and IBM products, you could spawn that exact customer-replicating environment in about 2 lines of text. Try that with Kubernetes!
  - anthk 5y ago
    LPAR makes LVM a joke.
    - mimixco 5y ago
      It's sad to read about the dev headaches caused by today's poor virtualization environments. I distinctly remember that stuff was no work at all at IBM. It didn't interfere one bit with the actual work of coding on the products. In fact, we really never thought about setups or creating environments for testing or development. In peer reviews, for example, it was standard to bring output from both the failing case and the working case as printed handouts. Those were easy to generate; just spin up two machines and fix one while you leave the other broken. They can share resources if you like so you don't have recreate everything. That is horribly messy today. Testing is so hard most people don't do it.
      - anthk 5y ago
        Also on simpler BSD's like OpenBSD, bioctl is dumb simple. Setting up a encrypted disk is a no effort task. On firewalls, PF has a syntax simpler than most text adventure games. Every time I get into the GNU world, well, I get better HW support sometimes, among a slight bit of performance, but, FFS, configuring a Linux firewall gives me nightmares everyday. Just compare NAT on Linux vs OpenBSD. Or TUN/TAP devices, where in OpenBSD it's just a matter of a SINGLE line at pf.conf and two hostname.if files to define the bridge and the tap device with a subnet. Done. Oh, and sysctl to set IP forwarding, but that was the easiest task on any OS.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  In a sense, a parallel sysplex with remote hosts and storage is a very sophisticated private cloud environment that'll run your CICS transactions a lot like you do with AWS Lambda.
- epc 5y ago
  The most logical place for a cloud service to develop inside IBM would have been IBM Global Services. IGS had a sort of proto-cloud set up in 1998-1999 (treated physical systems as cattle that could be remote wiped, virtualization would have been a logical next step) but sold off the organization building that to AT&T as part of the Global Network sale. I wrote a horrible, hacky, CMS PIPES based gopher/http server for VM some time in 1993 that was used internally for various "non serious" things. A colleague and I designed a native HTTP server for MVS in 1995 and had started coding it when we were more or less reprimanded and told to defer to the then Network Services division which was porting something (I think CERN httpd, they had a bizarre fascination with CERN) to MVS. It just wasn't in anyone's best interest to even experiment with web services on VM or MVS, let alone try to build a business out of it. Cloud happened after I left, but the infrastructure to build or respond to the rise of AWS was never in place, sort of by design.
ngcc_hk 5y ago
It is so stressful and alienated that the decades spent on mainframe is good but not great. I worked on the partition Management called lpar. Os and db2 etc. It is sort of more interesting to do dos/vse. I guess instead of thousands of users you have hundreds. I love my Hp 200 dos calculator whilst waiting for the cartridge to run, … at least it is not open reel tape as the cartridge tape at least always suck in.

pm90 5y ago

It’s interesting that IBM wasn’t sooner to the cloud with superior virtualization technology.

mimixco 5y ago
Just like the PC, they didn't realize it was important until it was too late. In my experience, mainframes are a superior way to develop and run every kind of software. The PC is a crippled, stupid stepchild by any reasonable comparison. Just the idea that you need to setup and manage 1,000 of them to come close to a small mainframe is ludicrous. Who needs the overhead and maintenance? Sure, you can swap machines and distribute loads between them, but who wants to? Yuck. It's a lot nicer to have that stuff handled automatically. Also like the PC, IBM didn't realize that their boxes could be used for this new funky thing called the internet. Talk about blind-sighted. Their first web product was an abomination they inherited from their purchase of Lotus. It didn't work and produced unusable websites, boding poorly for IBM's entry into that market which was already taking off with Active Server Pages and XMLHTTP. If IBM had loudly (and correctly) proclaimed that mainframes were the place to run web services, everyone and their mother would be running mainframes right now instead of Linux boxes. IBM's eventual realization of this led to their purchase of Red Hat!
- azinman2 5y ago
  Well, not just mainframes generally, but if they created AWS on mainframes and hosted them… that would have made it accessible for startups.
  - mimixco 5y ago
    It was so simple internally, they could have ported those tools to a GUI. But GUI's and user interfaces are not something IBM has ever done well (other than command line ones).
    - azinman2 5y ago
      I would argue neither has AWS yet…
    - ngcc_hk 5y ago
      The organisation is also in the way. Both in Ibm and for those teams using ibm. Very bureaucratic and like token ring over management kill. Good and have its niche. But murder by the liberal Ethernet.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  > If IBM had loudly (and correctly) proclaimed that mainframes were the place to run web services, everyone and their mother would be running mainframes right now instead of Linux boxes. No, they wouldn't. I could take one Linux box, get a domain name, and have a web server. I wouldn't be able to afford a mainframe, though. And if your alternative is renting a fraction of a mainframe, the answer is no. No, I will not trade a Linux box that I control for renting a piece of a mainframe that I don't control. Just no.
  - mimixco 5y ago
    For enterprise is what I meant. Not for individuals.
mimixco 5y ago
Sidenote: In VM, you could spawn a new machines with "physical" storage or drives (Nothing was physical on the mainframe; everything is faked just for you! Awesome.) by typing a single command at the command prompt! If you needed to fix a bug in some combination of operating system and IBM products, you could spawn that exact customer-replicating environment in about 2 lines of text. Try that with Kubernetes!
- anthk 5y ago
  LPAR makes LVM a joke.
  - mimixco 5y ago
    It's sad to read about the dev headaches caused by today's poor virtualization environments. I distinctly remember that stuff was no work at all at IBM. It didn't interfere one bit with the actual work of coding on the products. In fact, we really never thought about setups or creating environments for testing or development. In peer reviews, for example, it was standard to bring output from both the failing case and the working case as printed handouts. Those were easy to generate; just spin up two machines and fix one while you leave the other broken. They can share resources if you like so you don't have recreate everything. That is horribly messy today. Testing is so hard most people don't do it.
    - anthk 5y ago
      Also on simpler BSD's like OpenBSD, bioctl is dumb simple. Setting up a encrypted disk is a no effort task. On firewalls, PF has a syntax simpler than most text adventure games. Every time I get into the GNU world, well, I get better HW support sometimes, among a slight bit of performance, but, FFS, configuring a Linux firewall gives me nightmares everyday. Just compare NAT on Linux vs OpenBSD. Or TUN/TAP devices, where in OpenBSD it's just a matter of a SINGLE line at pf.conf and two hostname.if files to define the bridge and the tap device with a subnet. Done. Oh, and sysctl to set IP forwarding, but that was the easiest task on any OS.
rbanffy 5y ago
In a sense, a parallel sysplex with remote hosts and storage is a very sophisticated private cloud environment that'll run your CICS transactions a lot like you do with AWS Lambda.
epc 5y ago
The most logical place for a cloud service to develop inside IBM would have been IBM Global Services. IGS had a sort of proto-cloud set up in 1998-1999 (treated physical systems as cattle that could be remote wiped, virtualization would have been a logical next step) but sold off the organization building that to AT&T as part of the Global Network sale. I wrote a horrible, hacky, CMS PIPES based gopher/http server for VM some time in 1993 that was used internally for various "non serious" things. A colleague and I designed a native HTTP server for MVS in 1995 and had started coding it when we were more or less reprimanded and told to defer to the then Network Services division which was porting something (I think CERN httpd, they had a bizarre fascination with CERN) to MVS. It just wasn't in anyone's best interest to even experiment with web services on VM or MVS, let alone try to build a business out of it. Cloud happened after I left, but the infrastructure to build or respond to the rise of AWS was never in place, sort of by design.

ngcc_hk 5y ago

It is so stressful and alienated that the decades spent on mainframe is good but not great. I worked on the partition Management called lpar. Os and db2 etc. It is sort of more interesting to do dos/vse. I guess instead of thousands of users you have hundreds. I love my Hp 200 dos calculator whilst waiting for the cartridge to run, … at least it is not open reel tape as the cartridge tape at least always suck in.