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Comment by lizknope | Hacker News Reader

I've never used or even seen a mainframe in 26 years in the tech industry. My brother in law works for a bank and basically the business runs on it.

The hardware and software are certainly impressive but does anyone use a mainframe for a new project and not just upgrading or expanding an existing system?

I'm in integrated circuit design and we have compute clusters with thousands of CPUs. For some jobs we use a single machine with 128 CPUs and over 2TB RAM. Some steps get split over 30 machines in parallel. All of this EDA / chip design software migrated from Sun and HP workstations in the 1980's and 90's to Linux x86 in the 2000's. I think some of it ran on mainframes in the 70's but does anyone use mainframes for scientific style calculations or is it just financial transaction / database kind of stuff?

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You'll most likely find it in large companies that operated in the 60s or 70s that haven't switched to anything new, mostly because their core business runs on it.

I know of two companies, and at least one still use it, had several summer jobs there. They make sheet metal rolls by flattening out train cart sized hunks of steel, and while the mainframe system didn't run the machines (operators and PLC handled that) it kept track of everything, inventory, logistics and planning. I used it to plan rail shipments, where to put each roll of sheet metal on a train and loaded them up.

Oh, fun times. I've been on the other side of that business in my past life, where I had to "revive" a business critical program written in VB3 (yes for Windows 3.x) after a computer migration that was used to calculate the weight of an aluminum or steel coil/roll via its dimensions so it could be input into the PLC for the feeder mechanism at the beginning of a production line that did forming/extruding of metals.

So on one end mainframes, on the other ends software written for DOS and Windows 3.x still being used in (at the time the 2010s) to keep critical infrastructure for manufacturing running.

That could have been a mainframe, but I think factories are much more likely to be using AS/400 aka IBM i. That runs on regular IBM Power servers these days.

Can confirm. Work for a midsize manufacturer. Core of the business is on AS/400 and DB2.

Although a lot of new development is happening in C#/SQL/.NET and BLAZOR.

> I've never used or even seen a mainframe in 26 years in the tech industry.

40 years here. Although in theory I've used a mainframe in college, but it wasn't IBM (Burroughs) and just seemed like "a computer" at the time. I also worked a bit on a terminal emulator for ICL mainframes, so probably at least logged in. So 40 years of saying "I wonder if the mainframe people already have a solution to this?"

Probably mainframes haven't been much used for HPC since the transition to Cray in the 70s.

Also 40 years, 25 in banking. Done several Unix to Z/OS, and Windows to VME integration projects.

I started my tech career as a student worker at my school district's office. They had a Unisys mainframe managing student and employee records; around 1998, they replaced the old system which was about 3 feet tall and maybe 20 feet long, with a 4U dual processor Pentium Pro running NT 4 with a Unisys emulator. Seemed to work just about as well, but the operator console seemed a lot less fun. Still interfaced with the giant impact printer to print out grades and payroll.

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