The Eternal Mainframe (2013)
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I can offer you all the stats you need.
On mini computers you used a different version of the language compiler depending on whether your hardware had this coprocessor or not. Typically you didn't make this choice, but the system administration people made sure the correct compilers were installed to generate hardware supported floating point or software floating point. That tradition seemed to make its way into PCs. It was a while before you could just assume that everyone had hardware supported floating point. Oh, and every language's software floating point was annoyingly different. So no portable way of writing binary floating point -- you had to convert to/from ASCII.
GPUs are like a new fangled hardware floating point external to the CPU. Now to gradually become part of the main system again.
Even later than that. The 80386 had the 80387 in 1987, and the 68030 had the 68881 in 1984. The '881 was the first square chip I ever used.
> Janie Crane: “An off switch?”
> Metrocop: “She'll get years for that. Off switches are illegal!”
> -Max Headroom, season 1, episode 6, “The Blanks”
As a callow 18 year old in 1980, I suggested to one of my parent's friends that the computer would be as important an invention as fire. He'd been a hippie 10 years earlier, and thought I was being childish, possibly because fire is so vital, more likely because he had a hippie's distrust of the computer's relationship to authority. In retrospect, he was probably right for either reason, though it took me multiple decades to catch on. This article does a nice job of laying out the case for being cautious.
IBM named its computer the PC, thus co-opting the term and forever being associated with it. But you have to remember back further.
[1] http://www.vpri.org/pdf/hc_pers_comp_for_children.pdf [2] http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/CSL-79-11_Al...
At once time in the early 70's DEC was calling the PDP-8 a "your own personal computer" stressing that its cost was such that you could dedicate the entire computer to a single individual, so why not buy several. This as opposed to the PDP-11 or VAX which were 'department' and 'organization' level computers.
Probably not. The path of computing has been directed by economics: cost and its counterpart, volume. There's no reason why any greenfield project would choose to host on a mainframe.
The administrators are rare and expensive, the hardware is expensive and single source, and the performance is mediocre.
I can kind of understand why core business processes don't get ported off of mainframes: the business risk is too high. I just don't understand why anyone would choose to start a new project on one.
By the way, there was a time when mainframes had multiple hardware sources for the same standard.
No amount of funny youtube videos or tag lines will paper over IBM's z-series pricing.
What if it was a lot cheaper and didn't require as many people to manage it? Certainly the markups on EC2 (and related) services are insane.
If I were a business owner, that is not a bet I'd make.
1. z-series experts are rare, expensive and typically old. Old does not mean unemployable, but it does mean a limited future career. Who's going to replace the current crop of experts? Internal education is a possibility that could work, but any way you cut the knot, it'll be more difficult than going with x86 and linux.
2. z-series hardware sucks. They are low volume parts who's main value is their backwards compatibility. If you think the hardware performance is acceptable today, will it be so in 10 years? Computer performance improvements have certainly slowed down, but peripheral vendors like nVidia continue to make solid progress. Even if IBM gets around to supporting them, you'll always be a 2nd class citizen compared to the PC platform: drivers, bus availability, etc. will be half baked or late.
3. z-series is off the main stream of computing. Huge numbers of talented software developers are building great open source software for linux (and other OS's) on x86. I don't know if administration on z-series can be done better or less expensively than on x86 today. I feel confident in saying that there will be no contest in 10-15 years. The pace of innovation is enormous, and IBM is not a company that can credibly make a commitment to bring that innovation to the mainframe.
4. Yes, mainframes can run linux and do various sorts of emulation. I don't think that that is a cost effective. I'm not alone in that assessment: if running mainframes was a cost effective way to run linux, I'd expect that to be the way big internet businesses run their internal data centers. They don't.
5. You'd have to deal with IBM sales. At least with x86, you have multiple sources for parts, and if you're big enough you can do contract manufacturing.
6. The markups for EC2 (especially the network transit) is really high. There is a continuum from Lambda and App Engine, through, EC2 to dedicated hardware rental like OVH and finally running your own. That is way more options than you have running on a mainframe: certainly way more vendors.
P.S. Huge fan of your writing.
Cloud trivially can't be more expensive than on-prem. Cloud is just on-prem at scale where they sell you the leftovers.
I'm sure 100% of what you say is true, but there is no real reason for any of it to be true. Mainframes have many, many advantages over bullshit like the EC2. The sheer amount of containerized gorp, deployment scaffolding, management infrastructure and nonsense that goes along with it could be abstracted into something like zOS and into a Z-machine. Frankly it should be abstracted into something less ad hoc; EC2 ecosystem is total garbage from any sort of design point of view, and the fact that the world is now victim of their internal operations random walk is a tragedy. Originally it was supposed to be simple: now you need to hire a similar headcount to what you'd need for ops at a data center; arguably a much larger headcount than you'd need with a mainframe. To say nothing of the operational complexity of deploying scalable solutions on EC2 vs Mainframe.
I am not advocating people actually jump in the dying mainframe business; just that it arguably makes more sense than the EC2 from an engineering perspective. If IBM weren't run by risk-avoiding mental midgets, they'd find a way to beat Amazon at this, and the world might actually be better for it.
For example, does Amazon have the CPU load to run many System Zs? Of course they do.
But Amazon probably started with one cheap PC connected to the web somewhere. And then two ... three .. and so on. By the time Amazon had the CPU load and business to need/afford a System Z, it was too late to change.
https://www.ibm.com/us-en/marketplace/managed-cloud-environm...
What I want back are the duck-strangling noises that the dial-up modem makes when connecting.
Previous PCs came from chips and designs that were originally built to power terminals for mainframes like the Intel 4004/8008, the 6502, and the Z80. Today's handheld dumb terminals for mainframes are built with ARM64 chips that are approaching "desktop" performance levels just like those old dumb term chips started to approach useful performance levels before someone realized you didn't need the mainframe anymore.
... and so the wheel turns.
I think the biggest current barrier to de-cloudification of mobile devices is the heavily and cryptographically locked down OS. That's a software thing, not a hardware thing.
One of the defining features of the minicomputer, and later microprocessor, was that the CPU did all the I/O. In mainframes of the 60s and beyond, the IO devices had their own small processing units (to be distinguished from the Central Processing Unit) so that if you wanted to write a group of blocks to a tape drive you could set them up and then send the tape drive controller a block of commands to make it happen and DMA the data.
While early machines like, canonically the alto in this case, bit-banged ethernet interfaces directly. The early UARTS were cool in that you could actually get them to do something with the bitstream to/from the terminal (i.e. buffer up to 8 bits at a time: wow!).
half duplex in your terminal came from blocks of terminals attached to a terminal controller (HDX existed in the teletype system before computers, but this channel controller model is why we still have it in our modern terminal drivers).
https://www-01.ibm.com/events/wwe/ast/mtm/audit.nsf/enrollal...?
The quote by Solzhenitsyn really cuts deep.
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn
It's one thing I don't miss from the 90s web design.