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Comment by dfboyd | Hacker News Reader

I think this is just an IBM PR piece. It ticks all the boxes: quotes from IBM customers, quotes from IBM staff, mentions the "Master the Mainframe" contest. You can tell because when it says "mainframe" it doesn't mean "any large computer", it means "Something descended from the IBM 360".

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Yes, because that's what the word "mainframe" means today, simply because all other machine architectures that were considered mainframes are now extinct.

I'm not saying it's not IBM PR, though.

Unisys's ClearPath series are considered to be mainframes (or so says Wikipedia). The most recent ClearPath Dorado model was introduced in 2015.

As for the article: This may be what Paul Graham called a "submarine".

Unisys represents two different mainframe families - those descending from Univac/Sperry 1100 and those descending from the Burroughs mainframes. Both are purely emulated on x64 these days. Personally I think the latter are especially interesting, much more so than IBM!

IBM is really going with whatever positive publicity they can muster trying to obscure the profoundly awful age discrimination that they’re guilty of. It’s brutally ironic that the same people who are preaching “young people need to do mainframe” are the same who are aggressively ditching their own senior, experienced, expensive mainframe people.

There are more surviving mainframe families than just IBM and Unisys:

- Groupe Bull still supports GCOS mainframes (descended from General Electric GECOS)

- NEC still supports ACOS mainframes (also descended from General Electric GECOS, but a different fork from Bull's) – only sold/used in Japan now, although in past decades NEC did attempt to sell them outside of Japan (not sure if anyone bought them though)

- Fujitsu still supports ICL VME mainframes (still used by some UK government agencies) and BS2000/OSD (still used in Germany mainly)

- I think some Fujitsu MSP and Hitachi VOS3 systems survive in Japan. (These are less than 100% compatible forks of IBM MVS.) They also used to exist in some other countries–e.g. here in Australia, although I doubt any are left here.

I notice that you repeatedly say "still supports". Do any of them still manufacture and sell those lines?

Fujitsu announced new GS21 mainframe models in 2018 [1]. (GS21 is partially IBM compatible at hardware and software level, mainly survives in Japan.)

And new BS2000 mainframe models in October 2019 [2]. (BS2000 is partially IBM compatible at instruction set level, but the OS is incompatible with any IBM OS; low end models are actually x86 servers running Linux with software emulation of the 390 instructions, while high end models have S/390-compatible CPUs.)

Atos (who own Groupe Bull) uploaded a brochure to their website in October last year [3] advertising their GCOS7/GCOS8 mainframes. The mainframes are actually Intel Xeon Windows servers running the legacy mainframe architecture under a software emulator. However, while in principle the software emulator could run on any Windows server, they only license it to run on their own hardware.

[1] https://www.fujitsu.com/global/about/resources/news/press-re...

[2] https://www.fujitsu.com/emeia/about/resources/news/press-rel...

[3] https://atos.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/BullSequana_M_BR...

It doesn't sound like any of that amounts to a still living architecture like the Z series with its own silicon still under active development. I wouldn't consider mere software emulation or an IBM compatible offshoot to represent an extant independent mainframe architecture.

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