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One of the slides by some IBM consultants presenting at the financial firm I used to work stated "Western Civilization runs on the mainframe." Considering how m
by chocolatelab82 4y ago
One of the slides by some IBM consultants presenting at the financial firm I used to work stated "Western Civilization runs on the mainframe." Considering how much banks still use mainframes, this is probably true.
- LeonenTheDK 4y agoI recently listened to a podcast episode which featured a gentleman who teaches mainframe related things at a university in the US and is deeply involved with the Open Mainframe Project. His statistic was 95% of financial transactions touch a mainframe somewhere along the way. From what I know, considering it's not "just" banks but pretty much any long running financial business (IE insurance companies), I believe it's one of the most used but least talked about technologies out there.
- mrobins 4y agoCan confirm. In a past life I had the pleasure of auditing the COBOL code of a major US insurer. They had a separate program for every line of service (Auto/GL/etc.) that would read every claim record and produce their actuarial tables. It was pretty fascinating to see how it all came together. Also despite the languages age after analyzing it for a length of time it was clearly elegant for that type of financial processing.
- JohnFen 4y agoNot just financial businesses. For instance, I worked on a product also used by one of the largest package shipping companies. A couple of their key systems consisted of mainframes running COBOL code.
- rbanffy 4y agoIf you like to listen to podcasts and are curious about mainframes, get Terminal Talk. It’s a lot of fun and the mainframe ecosystem is a completely alien biosphere totally different from the Unix space we are more used to see.