How “Old” Technology Still Runs the World | Hacker News Reader

How “Old” Technology Still Runs the World

iafrikan.com

22 pointstefo-mohapi11 comments

There is no substance to this blog post. It is just someone claiming certain industries still use mainframes...ok. Not sure why people are upvoting it.

Over time I've developed a speed-reading technique where I skim quickly past the common introductory/padding words of no substance. I just found myself at the end of the article feeling like the whole thing was just an introduction with no substance or conclusion. Then I came here and saw your comment, so I know I'm not alone.

I badly wish for every article to have a tl;dr version at the very top.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLUF_%28communication%29

I've hyper optimized this by just skipping to the tldr; comments. Thought I failed to do that on this article :(

I often skip the first paragraph out right.

If anybody still has the equipment in the picture, please contact the Computer Museum in Mountain View.

The picture is a set of IBM System/360 mainframe components from the 1960s, displayed for a advertising photo. It's not even a working system. Nobody is using anything that old; you can't get the parts to maintain it.

Google Image Search is getting very smart. Although that specific image isn't known to Google, it identifies the picture as "ibm system 360".

(Top center is an IBM 2321 data cell drive, 400 MB of storage on strips of magnetic tape with a complicated mechanism to get to any of them in about 1 second. Sold 1964-1975.)

(Found the picture.[1] It's from the original IBM System/360 product announcement in 1964. The one that introduced the word "byte")

[1] http://millennialmainframer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/3...

Plenty of businesses still use AS400s. PDP-11s control nuclear reactors, and the US government keeps its nuclear launch codes on 8" floppy disks.

This makes me think of the 100-year-old technology and architecture running the New York subway system.

http://www.businessinsider.com/this-is-why-the-new-york-city...

other's here have criticized this article pretty effectively.

my own peeve with it is that it further relegates client-server computing to the dustbin of history by thinking of centralized data resources as servers, and users' computers as clients, rather than, say, the user's X desktop (or smartphone screen!) is the server accessed by a centralized computer center information client, which is much more expansive and instructive view of what client-server was supposed to be, a way for computers to talk to each other and distribute resources as it made sense.

The modern implementations seem to be more victim-advertiser than client-server.

Written language? The wheel? Irrigation?

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