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Interesting that the article says nothing about salaries and available positions. And, also, at the end, the article mentions that Fujitsu is finishing with ma

Interesting that the article says nothing about salaries and available positions. And, also, at the end, the article mentions that Fujitsu is finishing with mainframes in 10 years. Young people are smarter than going aboard a sinking ship.

_mlbt 3y ago
On the other hand working on mainframes could be a lucrative option for the over 50 crowd that is being age discriminated against by Silicon Valley.
- water_556 3y ago
  [dead]
- justinclift 3y ago
  > over 50 crowd IBM probably wouldn't hire them anyway, even if they publicly say they will for PR reasons.
skissane 3y ago
> And, also, at the end, the article mentions that Fujitsu is finishing with mainframes in 10 years. I think people are reading more into this announcement than it actually means. Fujitsu has three mainframe lines: GS21, BS2000, and VME. The announcement it links to is only about GS21 hardware, not BS2000 or VME. GS21 started out as clones of IBM mainframes, including both Fujitsu's Japanese clone line, and also Amdahl in the US. In the 1980s thru the first half of the 1990s, Fujitsu's Japanese clones were popular in some countries outside Japan (e.g. Australia), and Amdahl's clones enjoyed a lot of popularity in the US. However, while IBM's own mainframes went from 31-bit to 64-bit in 2000, Fujitsu's GS21 line got stuck on 31-bit. AFAIK, nobody uses it anymore except in Japan, non-Japanese customers either migrated off the mainframe or switched to IBM. In Japan, it clings on in government and some large corporations, but is deeply legacy. BS2000 has a very different heritage. RCA used to sell mainframes in the US. One of their (several incompatible) mainframe lines was partially compatible with IBM S/360, having the same assembly language in user space. However, kernel mode instructions and the software were incompatible. Siemens in Germany bought the rights to it. It ended up surviving in Europe even after it died in the US. Eventually Siemens sold it to Fujitsu. VME was originally the British mainframe manufacturer ICL, which Fujitsu ended up buying. The British government is (I believe) the only people still using it, and they've been trying to get rid of it. Both VME and BS2000 haven't had their own physical hardware for years now – they are just software emulators running under Linux or Windows. As such, they are easy to "migrate to the Cloud". Fujitsu is likely to keep on supporting them (to some degree) as long as there remains at least one customer willing to pay enough $$$ to sustain it. Given that, any timeframes for phasing either out should be taken with a large grain of salt, since their future really depends on how long it takes the remaining customers to get off them. Coming to this GS21 announcement – I understand Fujitsu wants to stop manufacturing and selling physical mainframes in Japan. They can just switch to software emulation like they do for BS2000 and VME. Like both of those, it can run fine in the cloud, and I expect they'll keep it running as long as there is customer demand. Promised future support timelines are very notional, if there is a big enough customer paying for an extension, the extension will happen. Plausibly, it could still be supported in 20 years time – maybe it is used by some essential Japanese government system, and the Japanese government's repeated attempts to migrate to a more modern platform end in failure (not an uncommon story for government IT projects)
- xarope 3y ago
  I haven't kept touch with the mainframe industry, but yes, you captured it succinctly, last I knew, a lot of IBM mainframe stuff was running on emulators. Albeit on highly available hardware.
  - skissane 3y ago
    > last I knew, a lot of IBM mainframe stuff was running on emulators. Albeit on highly available hardware. That's rather different from what I've heard: IBM refuses to allow any remotely recent versions of their mainframe operating systems to run in production on anything except their own physical hardware. A lot of hobbyists run ancient OS versions under Hercules – like MVS 3.8J, which has bugfixes up to circa 1985, but feature-wise is stuck in the early-to-mid 1970s – which is legally allowed since IBM intentionally released those super-old versions into the public domain. But, I doubt anybody is still using OS versions that old in production – maybe there's a handful of sites still running 1990s versions, but all of those IBM won't let you legally run on Hercules. Basically the only emulator they allow is their own super-expensive one (zPDT/etc), and only for development use. Hercules can run newer versions fine, but not legally. [0] So, while almost every other mainframe vendor has moved (or is moving) to a purely software-emulated solution, IBM insists on physical hardware – because they are trying to keep their high-margin mainframe hardware business alive for as long as possible. Eventually, as the install base continues to gradually decline, they'll likely terminate the physical hardware line, and pivot to software emulation as other mainframe vendors have. However, (just like all the other remaining mainframe vendors do), they'll only license the OS to run on their own proprietary emulator, not open source ones like Hercules. One option some sites have gone with is "application-level" emulation aka mainframe rehosting software – don't emulate the actual mainframe hardware to run the real OS, instead recompile the app using a COBOL (or PL/I or whatever) compiler for Unix/Linux/Windows, combined with an emulator which just emulates the mainframe OS calls (and calls to middleware products such as CICS). This approach is taken by products such as NTT/Dell's UniKix and Oracle's Tuxedo ART. The downside is you need to recompile your app on the new platform, and the emulator only supports a subset of the OS/middleware calls. If you are lucky, and your app is pretty vanilla, it may all just work. If your app relies on obscure or newer OS/middleware features, you may have to rewrite significant portions of it. Also, it doesn't address large parts of the skills gap – you still need to know COBOL and mainframe APIs, but now you also need to understand what subset of those mainframe APIs is actually implemented by the rehosting package – although at least OS-level admin is now mainstream and the exotic stuff is purely application/middleware level [0] With some super-rare exceptions: e.g. IBM used to allow people to run their operating systems on FSI's FLEX-ES, mostly just for development, but including some low-end production use. From what I've heard, they stopped allowing this for new customers 15+ years ago, but sites who licensed it for low-end prod use back then are allowed to keep on running it, and there are still a small number who do. I've also heard that those customers are stuck on really old mainframe OS versions – although late 1990s/early 2000s rather than the 1970s/1980s of the public domain MVS 3.8J – because IBM refuses to license newer versions to run on FLEX-ES

_mlbt 3y ago

On the other hand working on mainframes could be a lucrative option for the over 50 crowd that is being age discriminated against by Silicon Valley.

water_556 3y ago
[dead]
justinclift 3y ago
> over 50 crowd IBM probably wouldn't hire them anyway, even if they publicly say they will for PR reasons.

skissane 3y ago

> And, also, at the end, the article mentions that Fujitsu is finishing with mainframes in 10 years. I think people are reading more into this announcement than it actually means. Fujitsu has three mainframe lines: GS21, BS2000, and VME. The announcement it links to is only about GS21 hardware, not BS2000 or VME. GS21 started out as clones of IBM mainframes, including both Fujitsu's Japanese clone line, and also Amdahl in the US. In the 1980s thru the first half of the 1990s, Fujitsu's Japanese clones were popular in some countries outside Japan (e.g. Australia), and Amdahl's clones enjoyed a lot of popularity in the US. However, while IBM's own mainframes went from 31-bit to 64-bit in 2000, Fujitsu's GS21 line got stuck on 31-bit. AFAIK, nobody uses it anymore except in Japan, non-Japanese customers either migrated off the mainframe or switched to IBM. In Japan, it clings on in government and some large corporations, but is deeply legacy. BS2000 has a very different heritage. RCA used to sell mainframes in the US. One of their (several incompatible) mainframe lines was partially compatible with IBM S/360, having the same assembly language in user space. However, kernel mode instructions and the software were incompatible. Siemens in Germany bought the rights to it. It ended up surviving in Europe even after it died in the US. Eventually Siemens sold it to Fujitsu. VME was originally the British mainframe manufacturer ICL, which Fujitsu ended up buying. The British government is (I believe) the only people still using it, and they've been trying to get rid of it. Both VME and BS2000 haven't had their own physical hardware for years now – they are just software emulators running under Linux or Windows. As such, they are easy to "migrate to the Cloud". Fujitsu is likely to keep on supporting them (to some degree) as long as there remains at least one customer willing to pay enough $$$ to sustain it. Given that, any timeframes for phasing either out should be taken with a large grain of salt, since their future really depends on how long it takes the remaining customers to get off them. Coming to this GS21 announcement – I understand Fujitsu wants to stop manufacturing and selling physical mainframes in Japan. They can just switch to software emulation like they do for BS2000 and VME. Like both of those, it can run fine in the cloud, and I expect they'll keep it running as long as there is customer demand. Promised future support timelines are very notional, if there is a big enough customer paying for an extension, the extension will happen. Plausibly, it could still be supported in 20 years time – maybe it is used by some essential Japanese government system, and the Japanese government's repeated attempts to migrate to a more modern platform end in failure (not an uncommon story for government IT projects)

xarope 3y ago
I haven't kept touch with the mainframe industry, but yes, you captured it succinctly, last I knew, a lot of IBM mainframe stuff was running on emulators. Albeit on highly available hardware.
- skissane 3y ago
  > last I knew, a lot of IBM mainframe stuff was running on emulators. Albeit on highly available hardware. That's rather different from what I've heard: IBM refuses to allow any remotely recent versions of their mainframe operating systems to run in production on anything except their own physical hardware. A lot of hobbyists run ancient OS versions under Hercules – like MVS 3.8J, which has bugfixes up to circa 1985, but feature-wise is stuck in the early-to-mid 1970s – which is legally allowed since IBM intentionally released those super-old versions into the public domain. But, I doubt anybody is still using OS versions that old in production – maybe there's a handful of sites still running 1990s versions, but all of those IBM won't let you legally run on Hercules. Basically the only emulator they allow is their own super-expensive one (zPDT/etc), and only for development use. Hercules can run newer versions fine, but not legally. [0] So, while almost every other mainframe vendor has moved (or is moving) to a purely software-emulated solution, IBM insists on physical hardware – because they are trying to keep their high-margin mainframe hardware business alive for as long as possible. Eventually, as the install base continues to gradually decline, they'll likely terminate the physical hardware line, and pivot to software emulation as other mainframe vendors have. However, (just like all the other remaining mainframe vendors do), they'll only license the OS to run on their own proprietary emulator, not open source ones like Hercules. One option some sites have gone with is "application-level" emulation aka mainframe rehosting software – don't emulate the actual mainframe hardware to run the real OS, instead recompile the app using a COBOL (or PL/I or whatever) compiler for Unix/Linux/Windows, combined with an emulator which just emulates the mainframe OS calls (and calls to middleware products such as CICS). This approach is taken by products such as NTT/Dell's UniKix and Oracle's Tuxedo ART. The downside is you need to recompile your app on the new platform, and the emulator only supports a subset of the OS/middleware calls. If you are lucky, and your app is pretty vanilla, it may all just work. If your app relies on obscure or newer OS/middleware features, you may have to rewrite significant portions of it. Also, it doesn't address large parts of the skills gap – you still need to know COBOL and mainframe APIs, but now you also need to understand what subset of those mainframe APIs is actually implemented by the rehosting package – although at least OS-level admin is now mainstream and the exotic stuff is purely application/middleware level [0] With some super-rare exceptions: e.g. IBM used to allow people to run their operating systems on FSI's FLEX-ES, mostly just for development, but including some low-end production use. From what I've heard, they stopped allowing this for new customers 15+ years ago, but sites who licensed it for low-end prod use back then are allowed to keep on running it, and there are still a small number who do. I've also heard that those customers are stuck on really old mainframe OS versions – although late 1990s/early 2000s rather than the 1970s/1980s of the public domain MVS 3.8J – because IBM refuses to license newer versions to run on FLEX-ES