I'm retired now, but I have been working with Mainframes & EAMs since 1964. I've worked with IBM, RCA's, Honeywell's, Burroughs, CDC, Crays, Nixdorf's, ICL's, Univac's, Xerox, Magnuson's, and more. It has taken me to 64 countries and met many great people both in the industry and out. A Great IBM update Video.
My first 10 years in the industry were spent on big mainframes in the banking industry back in the 1980's doing transaction processing with ATM's and branch automation (and more). We had virtualization and distributed systems long before PC's even had viable networking. It's been interesting watching it go full circle over the last 40 years. A room full of rack mounted individual machines always seemed unnecessarily complex compared to a room full of a couple of mainframes.
They're just different ways of looking at the problem. Some things are still best solved with a mainframe. ('tho, few people actually do those things.)
@@jfbeam Idiots resort to open source on a pc and then wonder why their lack or procedures cost them their employment. Mainframes forced a discipline of responsibilities to people specialising; pc's have hackers that do what can be done because it can be done with software sourced from unsure places!
Between 1997 and 2016 I used to work at Miami Dade College. The IT department had an IBM OS/390 with MVS Operating system. I was one of the 25 developers maintining applications with thousands on lines of code written in JCL, Cobol and Natural. The system also had night shift operators running scheduled jobs for the users. Online serving 8 campuses, 36,000 students and 4,000 employees. The system was running smothly until everything was migrated to ERP PeopleSoft working on PCs
Yeah I know quite a few people from MDC who very much dislike PeopleSoft compared to what was there before simply because of how bad the implementation was. Then again, it's Oracle tech... Old system was called Odessey right? Something similar? For some reason I remember it having a name that starts with the letter "O"
I've learned so much about mainframes over the past year, and I'll tell you, I was very surprised! So much of global commerce and transactional processes are run on IBM mainframes, and I also didn't know that most batch jobs are run through IBM mainframes as well. This video was very informative and helpful, Rosalind. Thank you!
1. Globally 90% of credit card transactions happen on mainframe systems. 2. Worldwide, mainframe systems handle 68% of information technology workloads. This accounts for only 6% of the total IT spending. There are a lot more such statistics. If something is old, it should not be considered old-fashioned!
Circa 2000 I worked in a data center in Nashville, TN. A coworker went to school with a guy who ran three mainframes, he got paid 200k a year for each (lots of money today, even more back then). When I asked what they were used for, thinking it was science or modeling, all three were payroll servers ;_; he told me how they processes thousands and thousands of paychecks in just a few days, for government, healthcare, etc. Not what I expected.
@@zmainframes what is the definition of information technology workloads? Google, Facebook, OpenAI, almost all the web and do much more, is running on Linux and windows. Or just add together all work done by PCs... I think the definition is tailored to make the mainframe statistics look good. When it comes to banking and other monetary transactions, I'm sure that is mainly handled by mainframes. Transactional data is where they are strong.
I've done software development for 20 something years, but never mainframe. Recently, I started the Zexplore tutorial and learning more about the hardware. It's a whole other universe! The hardware throughput and flexibility of configuration is absolutely bonkers. Now It feels like commodity hardware has basically been asleep for the last decade.
I was too at first, then figured it was done with technology. Which it is - see link above. However, decades ago when I lived in Toronto the local TV station CFTO had a “weatherman” (as they were called back then) named Dave Duval. Dave would stand behind a glass map and write all the temperature forecasts backwards so they’d look right on camera. No tech involved. I thought then that it was an amazing skill. Later I decided it might have been an excellent way for Duval to turn dyslexia into a job advantage.
Circa 2000 I worked in a data center in Nashville, TN. A coworker went to school with a guy who ran three mainframes, he got paid 200k a year for each (lots of money today, even more back then). When I asked what they were used for, thinking it was science or modeling, all three were payroll servers ;_; he told me how they processes thousands and thousands of paychecks in just a few days, for government, healthcare, etc. Not what I expected.
ROFL I was a Customer Engineer in the 80s, in the General Systems Division. What customers did with computers was boring, but it was all about MONEY. When I built a home computer one of my fellow employees asked me, "Why do you want a computer at home"? I just bought a used computer for $150 more powerful than any mainframe IBM had back then. We are living in science fiction. Most people just don't know what to do with it.
Running ancient software no one dares touch. 🙂 I just read an interesting bit about NC Dept of Revenue being "unable" to change "10%" to "5%" in their mainframe app(s). The penalty for late payment of income tax changed in 2022, and it'll change again, but no one knows where/how to update the process(es) that asses and send out bills. They are _manually_ having to correct each bill. (currently over 500k and growing.) But mainframes are "modern"... any "modern" software has that in a single box. (sales tax... and entire database!) It's not like they can put that COBOL(!) program on a USB thumb drive where someone can edit it with vi.
I think IBM Mainframe users should bring the customers to talk about it.. only then people in the world and the tech professionals will realize the significance of it.. Unfortunately customers can't be brought for IBM's benefit and of course their's.. today's world needs more advertisement.. New Tech guys don't check the facts.. So, along with facts, we need the real users (customers of mainframes) who should come front and talk about it.. then eventually they will find it a career opportunity and join us..
Retired z/OS sysprog. What do I think of when I hear "mainframe"? Hyper-reliable. Ours had a CPU fail once. How did we know? IBM called my boss to schedule the CE to come in to replace a module, hot swap. We didn't suffer any outage because the firmware swithed in a backup CPU and restarted the failing instruction on it. No user or system software outage. Just and entry in the OS hardware log.
Modern architectures design to assume failure at any point so a failing cpu/memory/disk/network doesn’t matter and is assumed for in the overall design. It’s less about 100% uptime of an individual component and more about 100% uptime of the system; a very important, and cost related, distinction. Run a chaos monkey on mainframe racks to get a feel for what I mean; or just have a brat pull random cables, cards and interconnects on the inside of the running mainframe racks for similar effect.
The last 3090 I was on was at a bank in the 90's. I was sold when I wrote a simple COBOL program to do some check processing and in less than 20 seconds or so, it went through 2M records. I was impressed!
Not one word was false, but it's all the same song for decades with IBM. They keep fighting the wrong fights. Telum is amazing. Z is amazing, but for a huge amount of the industry, that's just noise.
I used a 1410 main frame in about 1963 to run a statistical model of a large experiment, then in grad school I used a 7040 main frame to run numerical models. In about 1970 my team fixed MVS to do cloud computing using remote Aschi card readers, punches and printers. Later on, I found VM/CMS much more useful than TSO as a development system. We could submit jobs to MVS for compilation and execution. I think that the video should talk more about z-os and hardware high reliability (like say Stratus) for CICS and IMS transactions.
Wish ISPF was still available for the x86 market. Loved the text editor! Started on IBM 1620/1710. Then 370, 390, and 3033. Also did DEC minis and helped invent the quad core for Intel.
Very interesting perspective, but the machine is not old because we don't have any new hardware, but because of part of the environment. For example, creating a file and editing it. Most corporations run mostly legacy Applications on them. It does have pretty powerful tools,, but nobody is telling me JCL is a language with a modern syntax. It's also expensive to run and maintain. I know high-performance cloud-based solutions are expensive too. The consolidation 40:1 is just wishful thinking unless we are comparing a hierarchical problem running on a relational database on Linux vs IMS running the same problem on the mainframe, or a 15K Linux box against a million-dollar Mainframe platform.
@@QqQ-h5hDepends on the problem you're trying to solve. Mainframes still have their place, just as stacks of 1U linux PCs do. The "40:1" claim is an apples to staples comparison... the workloads mainframes typically do vs. the workloads typical of a PC. I've not had to deal with a "mainframe" (AS/400) for over 20 years, and even then it was running 20 year old [telco] applications. Every one of the applications was eventually replaced with web applications on very cheap PC hardware. Metasolv for circuit design, custom stuff for trouble management, commercial apps for CRM and billing. All of it -- the software, machines, people -- cost less than we were paying EDS for a single month of mainframe time.
@@QqQ-h5h Yes outside the parameters I set. Cleary you can always find some toy problem that runs better that much better on the mainframe, but you can do the same with x86 or power.
There's still a skills shortage for classic "Z" as we are all old (or dead) but I guess this video is aimed at getting new customers on z hardware. In 1982 I was told "COBOL only has 5 years left" Nope.
There are some attempts to automate CBL code migration to Java and C# but I'm not sure if any big MF players are interested in this. I wish COBOL had more open-source tools available. Other than mostly closed ecosystem - COBOL is really solid and mature language (just like Pascal is solid and mature language). People who make fun of these two - never really touched them, or wrote anything, other than 'Hello world'.
If it's not expensive, why don't you explain how z/OS license price changes proportionately with CPU count... or how much a 64GB memory upgrade costs.... Oh, and the IBM cloud charges you a mere $5.28 per hour for a small z/OS VM...
where else are you going to find millisecond per year down times, and the type of rock solid stability offered by a mainframe? are you comparing it to a rack full of standard servers and storage?
“Back in the day” I spend almost 40 years creating software for an IBM mainframe environment. I’ve seen the rise (and fall) of “minicomputers,” and the rise and proliferation of PC’s and networks. All are good, depending upon the task. But like I like to say, “PC’s are fast, but Mainframes SCREAM with power.” Long live Mainframes! But I still like my PC (and iPhone, too)
YoY apprx. 3-5% of the Mainframe Customers decommissioned their MF in Germany. Reason: Skill gap (Cobol, Assembler, PL/1, z/OS SysProg, Db2 and IMS skills etc.), Cost (24% MLC Increase of IBM Software and of course of the ISVs), Agility in Development. Each industry is affected (Insurance, Finance, Public, Retail, Automotive etc.). Good bye mainframe....
COBOL and JCL on an IBM 360 almost made me abandon my new career. Then, my dad convinced me to try out the AS/400. I have yet to meet anyone who has worked on this system who didn't love it. The health insurance system that ran on my first mainframe took a dozen people to maintain. On an iSeries, I could have done it by myself (part-time).
Basically it's a mainframe on steroids, occupies less space, flexibility in working in various cloud environments, conducive to applications development and maintenance
IBM mainframes had a reputation for being old and stodgy, even when I was a kid, but they are really impressive tech for their use case. What they were built to do, they do like no other system. And with Linux on z coexisting alongside z/OS on different LPARs on the same computer, mainframes are poised to bridge the world of modern tech with the world of applications that have been running since before hippies emerged. I find the mainframe platform fascinating.
I have been working on Mainframes from past 16 years for some of the world's finest banks, insurance and retails customers. Trust me there was not an single day in my 16 years I have seen it going down. Mainframe is and will be reliable and scalable. The best in the market.
I never understood why IBM was so intent on making mainframes seem affordable. They're not! And that's OK. You're paying (handsomely) for very specific benefits that are only worth it to a small portion of the overall compute market. I also don't understand why IBM is intent on throwing every workload on these things. A lot will never work on z series, like commercial applications compiled for x86 for Windows/Linux, so you still have to have that platform running as well along side z in most cases. And your average DC workload, you can put it on an x86 blade system or similar for a *fraction* of what if would cost to run on z, and you can run a *much* wider variety of workloads on it to boot. I don't hate mainframes, but they're great for only a small niche of workloads. For the rest, they're just overly expensive.
for the tools depends. A lot of companies simply does not want to spend money for best tools so basically you continue with old way of programming. In that sense ibm can help with more affordable way to use modern tools ...
As a retired sysprog, when I think mainframe, I think RACF. I know it has been renamed but it's still the BEST. ALL the other features would be in danger without it.
I remember PROFS, an office app that ran on the big iron. I was at IBM Canada, in the late 90s, when we were moving to Lotus Notes, for pretty much the same things as could be done with PROFS.
IBM should look to what DEC (RIP) did that kept VMS/OpenVMS alive as long as it has been... The Hobbyist Community. I'd love to play with z/OS myself, but IBM has refused to allow access to it via Hercules - not because it won't run on it, but simply licensing. If IBM made the technology accessible to the hobbyist community, they'd probably not have to make videos like this to convince people that z/OS platform is good, they'd have a lot of folks that would do that work for them and for free. I'd be willing to bet that there would be tons of "how-to" videos on z/OS and those extolling it's virtues if it were made available for the hobbyist community... Just my 2 cents worth...
I worked on Mainframes until the early 90s and then again 1998 with millennium issues. Moved onto UNIX/Oracle then Windows SQL Server. On the mainframe you needed so many more staff toto the same job. DBAs, System Programmers, operations staff etc. how has this been rationalised?
What goes around comes around. The issue isn't that mainframes are outdated, but the business requirements the fill are becoming more niche. Back in the 1970s, 1980s mainframes were needed for nearly every large organization to handle rather simple (in todays standards) form apps. Then PC came affordable and performed faster per user than the mainframe, for the basic form/small data number crunching. Then we went to centralized databases where mainframes became more useful, then PC hardware became good enough to run most small to midsized scale databaes. The Internet began to boom, where larger mainframe systems could handle the load of hundreds of connections a second, then PC Distributed hardware servers came out to handle a lot of this action... The real question isnt if the mainframe is better, but is it cheaper inital cost system good enough. As most companies need to budget for short term needs and large single expense even if it will offer a lower TCO is a tough sell to management.
What people think is "Cloud" is still so incorrect. It isn't containers or virtualisation. Cloud is the use of commodity applications services provided over the network with a consumption based pricing model. Running your own kit and running containers is no more cloud than using a Cpanel host in 2005.
Is she using poorly designed windows server data centers for her numbers? Non-Windows servers have put hundreds of “systems” in 1/4 - 1/2 rack for decades; hundreds of CPU’s, gigs to terabytes of RAM/cache. Mainframe and regular servers usually put storage in other racks so not counting that. You use mainframes to kick I/O ass and satisfy regulatory financials; everything else went to commodity racks a long time ago.
That's such a great comparison mainframe is not going anywhere it just kept optimised on a daily basis and most 500 fortune companies using mainframe....we don't have enough talent to work in mainframe technology ....there is huge shortage companies are facing they need skilled mainframe developer
I picture most people with mainframe skills are 50+ years old. No younger people get into IT to be a mainframe jockey. When IBM hits you with hardware and licensing costs and you recover from that shock, a data center full of super micro or other brand of Linux servers looks reasonable in comparison.
Fear of becoming unemployable has discouraged many young people from getting obscure mainframe skills. This is similar to the problem of persuading people to learn my favourite computer language ada.
Punch cards forever! 🙂 Actually, many skills are the same or similar. Is there much of a difference in working with Linux or web servers on mainframes, compared to PCs?
Hello everyone, I have 5 years of experience in Mainframe and took a break in 2015. Now I’m running a restaurant. I always wanted to go back to IT. What course would you recommend to update my resume and find a job? Please help
Yes but, mainframe are still use to run applications develops in the 80’s and 90’s, COBOL, IMS, DB2, CICS, Assembler and those skills are not teach anymore, yes the computer is powerful, but that’s not how they are use.
She, at least, has the skill to write with her left hand from right to left in mirror. Perhaps that is needed to be an expert on Mainframes as well. My biggest concern, no matter how unarguably awesome those systems are: Vendor lock in. Your entire system is in the hand of one and only one company. And companies sometimes make stupid decisions. BWT: I'd love to work on a z system.
In school I wrote in IBM assembly. I'm sure the instruction set has evolved but is it still based on on that instruction set? I've heard that the modern systems can still run software from 60 years ago. I don't think thats a bad thing btw.
@@RahulSinha-l5uMost companies especially small to mid size are ok with the downsize of horizontal scaling. Mainframe is a vertically scaled system and is extremely expensive up front with long term risk of vendor lock in and lack of talent. Additionally centrally managed system is not as flexible. You can spin up linux clusters in minute but getting a CICS region on z/OS created can take weeks as you need sign off from capacity / network socket / DB2 / MQ / etc.
When your application absolutely, positively needs to run without interruption. You can add/swap CPU, disks, memory and any other components on the fly. Yes, it is expensive.
In 1980 the IBM 3033 cost $3,000,000. That was with ONE CPU. IBM talked about channels but never gave a good explanation of what they were. I presume they were I/O processors taking that workload off of the single CPU. It was possible to get 2 CPUs on the 3033 but then the price went up significantly. Mainframes no longer exist people just keep using the word. IBM did not use the word 'minicomputer', that was for scum like, DEC and Data General. The things called mainframes today are massive collections of microprocessors with great attention and effort put into reliability and redundancy. The true Big Iron is gone. There was a benchmark program in the Jan 1983 BYTE Magazine that tested lots of computers and languages. The 3033 running assembly language beat all comers. I rewrote that program years ago in 'C'. I recently purchased a used Dell Optiplex with a Core i7. I estimate it is about 70 times as powerful as a 3033 and that is ignoring the inefficiency of the compiled code.
@@IBMTechnology I am not aware of any technology in history that has changed like micro-electronics. I did not mention that the $3 million 3033 had 8 megabytes of memory and the used Dell was $150 with 16 Gigabytes of memory. 20,000 times less money and 2,000 times as much memory while not taking inflation into account.
The real power of the MF is in its I/O, not necessarily raw compute ability. But IBM putting an "AI Engine" in the latest CPU may be seen as a vein attempt to stay relevant. No one is going to buy an expensive, massive z-system for AI/ML that can already be done in a 2U system for 1% the cost -- and it's WAY faster... IBM isn't known for their GPUs!
Last mainframe I programmed was a 3033, supporting about 5000 terminals. A channel is an I/o pathway to a device, so you can interact with things like disk, tape, printers etc off a channel. But a channel is more than a PCI slot, channels have brains. So you can instruct an I/o to do a data transfer with (effectively) parameters telling the device what to do, the SCC instruction if I remember correctly, and when the I/o is completed, your thread is resumed. Most folks never need to dig this deep, there are higher level commands that hide this detail. If you are not a system programmer, then playing with channel commands is just for fun. A 3033 probably has less computational ability than a smartphone, definitely less memory, but you can’t hang 5000 users off a smartphone. The power of the old school mainframes was the autonomous power of the peripherals, keeping as much work as possible off the CPU.
I did worrk on a 3033 at ibm in 1982, theses io processors was named director if i m not mistaken,and you re right they process io to freeup the core cpu of theses duties, the fact is the channels that was behind, managing data exchanges with disk etc was having high bandwith, 5 MB/s if i m not mistaken,a lot in 1982 where drives was sized at 300 mo, but in high numbers.
Sadly in many Companys Projects hast been Setup to leave the Mainframe. Also you get less young people been interested learning mainframe. Projects are mostly Planned Not on Mainframe Management people learned Linux or Cloud in there Studium. And that ist what they Push..because they think to now the advantages.
IT would be helpful when IBM would Support Mini Z/Os Installations on Windows. I remeber Herculess Emulator what helps me a Lot getting closer to z/os. Make It avail for students.
I appreciate the effort, but you have to know what the myths are before you debunk them. You should interview a developer who grew up with PCs to find that out. I still have no idea how it's structurally different from a huge multicore PC, where the "batch processing" comes in (does it still?), why the AS/400 text interface (still?) seems to be the norm.
So I am achieving over 100 GFlop/s on a Ryzen 9 processor. That is less than $5/GFlop. How does the Telum processor compare at $/GFlops ? Thats 100 billion floating point operations per second on a $500 processor. Think about that !
I think IBM mainframes are things of buty, row machine power highly optimized hardware to run very and very big tasks and you can mine crypto, but the best use for mainframe in my experiance are running complex datasets and like filter trough them for valuable data.
So how much does a mainframe cost these days? Videos tell how much mainframes cost in past years, but EVERYONE wants to keep the price of todays mainframes a secret. To me that is as important a spec as processing power.
Nice marketing. They aren't "myths". Show of hands: how many people are submitting python jobs to their mainframe? (not running scripts in a linux image on the MF.) how many are still running COBOL (or FORTRAN) that was originally written decades ago? Most people run mainframes because they always have. The applications / workloads they run can't be retooled for anything else. (time, money, proven reliability, etc. etc.) [COBOL is really hard to translate into anything sensible.] The claims of "40:1", power and space efficiency are "lies, damned lies, and statistics." For the cost of one modern (z16) MF -- and _licenses_ -- I can *build* a small data center. (the last one... the power cost less than half what IBM charges for a single z/OS VM.)
So not much of a difference between todays mainframe, and a big 2u server (or multiple 2U servers).. So really the myth is the mainframe which means they are old big expensive boxes from the past. Your Zbox is really nothing more than a consolidation of 2U/3U/4U servers in a pretty IBM custom rack, with some IBM boiler plate gluing it all together. . meh... Everything mentioned here I can do on my old Dell R815 box. so meh meh...
Funny... I have an R815 on the corner of my desk. (off currently... it's a bit loud) 48 cores, ~200G? RAM; uses about 200W most of the time. (DRAC set to 400W limit.) I've never run payroll on the thing, so I can't compare it to a MF. ;-)
This is nonsense and explains nothing. Mainframes maybe do have their uses, but it is rarely performance. It is more about paranoid security and redundancy at all levels, it is about legacy software. Google doing 60k transactions per second. Taken from who knows where. I worked there, and I can tell you we were doing 60 billions of transactions per second years ago.
Meh… One way marketing video is about as old as the Mainframe itself; sure people still use it, but modern theory runs away from it at first opportunity.
I'm retired now, but I have been working with Mainframes & EAMs since 1964. I've worked with IBM, RCA's, Honeywell's, Burroughs, CDC, Crays, Nixdorf's, ICL's, Univac's, Xerox, Magnuson's, and more. It has taken me to 64 countries and met many great people both in the industry and out. A Great IBM update Video.
My first 10 years in the industry were spent on big mainframes in the banking industry back in the 1980's doing transaction processing with ATM's and branch automation (and more). We had virtualization and distributed systems long before PC's even had viable networking. It's been interesting watching it go full circle over the last 40 years. A room full of rack mounted individual machines always seemed unnecessarily complex compared to a room full of a couple of mainframes.
They're just different ways of looking at the problem. Some things are still best solved with a mainframe. ('tho, few people actually do those things.)
@@jfbeam Idiots resort to open source on a pc and then wonder why their lack or procedures cost them their employment. Mainframes forced a discipline of responsibilities to people specialising; pc's have hackers that do what can be done because it can be done with software sourced from unsure places!
Proud to be Mainframe Developer
Between 1997 and 2016 I used to work at Miami Dade College. The IT department had an IBM OS/390 with MVS Operating system. I was one of the 25 developers maintining applications with thousands on lines of code written in JCL, Cobol and Natural. The system also had night shift operators running scheduled jobs for the users. Online serving 8 campuses, 36,000 students and 4,000 employees. The system was running smothly until everything was migrated to ERP PeopleSoft working on PCs
Until 😂
Yeah I know quite a few people from MDC who very much dislike PeopleSoft compared to what was there before simply because of how bad the implementation was. Then again, it's Oracle tech...
Old system was called Odessey right? Something similar? For some reason I remember it having a name that starts with the letter "O"
I've learned so much about mainframes over the past year, and I'll tell you, I was very surprised! So much of global commerce and transactional processes are run on IBM mainframes, and I also didn't know that most batch jobs are run through IBM mainframes as well. This video was very informative and helpful, Rosalind. Thank you!
Is there a bank in that is not running Mainframe? Federal and State Government? Mainframe is still the safest way to process financial transactions
1. Globally 90% of credit card transactions happen on mainframe systems.
2. Worldwide, mainframe systems handle 68% of information technology workloads. This accounts for only 6% of the total IT spending.
There are a lot more such statistics. If something is old, it should not be considered old-fashioned!
Circa 2000 I worked in a data center in Nashville, TN. A coworker went to school with a guy who ran three mainframes, he got paid 200k a year for each (lots of money today, even more back then). When I asked what they were used for, thinking it was science or modeling, all three were payroll servers ;_; he told me how they processes thousands and thousands of paychecks in just a few days, for government, healthcare, etc. Not what I expected.
What? Isn't "running a batch job" synonyms with running something on a mainframe?
@@zmainframes what is the definition of information technology workloads? Google, Facebook, OpenAI, almost all the web and do much more, is running on Linux and windows. Or just add together all work done by PCs... I think the definition is tailored to make the mainframe statistics look good. When it comes to banking and other monetary transactions, I'm sure that is mainly handled by mainframes. Transactional data is where they are strong.
If more people spent just 5 minutes watching this,then the world would be a better place
lol no
I've done software development for 20 something years, but never mainframe. Recently, I started the Zexplore tutorial and learning more about the hardware. It's a whole other universe! The hardware throughput and flexibility of configuration is absolutely bonkers. Now It feels like commodity hardware has basically been asleep for the last decade.
I am impressed with the backwards writting.
See ibm.biz/write-backwards
@@IBMTechnology. I'd never thought of that. That's a neat trick. Just make sure the IBM logon on any tee shirt is backwards then.
I was too at first, then figured it was done with technology. Which it is - see link above. However, decades ago when I lived in Toronto the local TV station CFTO had a “weatherman” (as they were called back then) named Dave Duval. Dave would stand behind a glass map and write all the temperature forecasts backwards so they’d look right on camera. No tech involved. I thought then that it was an amazing skill. Later I decided it might have been an excellent way for Duval to turn dyslexia into a job advantage.
Circa 2000 I worked in a data center in Nashville, TN. A coworker went to school with a guy who ran three mainframes, he got paid 200k a year for each (lots of money today, even more back then). When I asked what they were used for, thinking it was science or modeling, all three were payroll servers ;_; he told me how they processes thousands and thousands of paychecks in just a few days, for government, healthcare, etc. Not what I expected.
Those days I started in IT and worked in a bank using machines of Tandem Computers, Inc.
ROFL
I was a Customer Engineer in the 80s, in the General Systems Division. What customers did with computers was boring, but it was all about MONEY.
When I built a home computer one of my fellow employees asked me, "Why do you want a computer at home"?
I just bought a used computer for $150 more powerful than any mainframe IBM had back then.
We are living in science fiction. Most people just don't know what to do with it.
Running ancient software no one dares touch. 🙂
I just read an interesting bit about NC Dept of Revenue being "unable" to change "10%" to "5%" in their mainframe app(s). The penalty for late payment of income tax changed in 2022, and it'll change again, but no one knows where/how to update the process(es) that asses and send out bills. They are _manually_ having to correct each bill. (currently over 500k and growing.) But mainframes are "modern"... any "modern" software has that in a single box. (sales tax... and entire database!) It's not like they can put that COBOL(!) program on a USB thumb drive where someone can edit it with vi.
Mainframes can batch process faster than any PC.
I think IBM Mainframe users should bring the customers to talk about it.. only then people in the world and the tech professionals will realize the significance of it.. Unfortunately customers can't be brought for IBM's benefit and of course their's.. today's world needs more advertisement.. New Tech guys don't check the facts.. So, along with facts, we need the real users (customers of mainframes) who should come front and talk about it.. then eventually they will find it a career opportunity and join us..
Retired z/OS sysprog. What do I think of when I hear "mainframe"? Hyper-reliable. Ours had a CPU fail once. How did we know? IBM called my boss to schedule the CE to come in to replace a module, hot swap. We didn't suffer any outage because the firmware swithed in a backup CPU and restarted the failing instruction on it. No user or system software outage. Just and entry in the OS hardware log.
Modern architectures design to assume failure at any point so a failing cpu/memory/disk/network doesn’t matter and is assumed for in the overall design.
It’s less about 100% uptime of an individual component and more about 100% uptime of the system; a very important, and cost related, distinction.
Run a chaos monkey on mainframe racks to get a feel for what I mean; or just have a brat pull random cables, cards and interconnects on the inside of the running mainframe racks for similar effect.
The last 3090 I was on was at a bank in the 90's. I was sold when I wrote a simple COBOL program to do some check processing and in less than 20 seconds or so, it went through 2M records. I was impressed!
Not one word was false, but it's all the same song for decades with IBM. They keep fighting the wrong fights. Telum is amazing. Z is amazing, but for a huge amount of the industry, that's just noise.
I used a 1410 main frame in about 1963 to run a statistical model of a large experiment, then in grad school I used a 7040 main frame to run numerical models. In about 1970 my team fixed MVS to do cloud computing using remote Aschi card readers, punches and printers. Later on, I found VM/CMS much more useful than TSO as a development system. We could submit jobs to MVS for compilation and execution. I think that the video should talk more about z-os and hardware high reliability (like say Stratus) for CICS and IMS transactions.
Wish ISPF was still available for the x86 market. Loved the text editor! Started on IBM 1620/1710. Then 370, 390, and 3033. Also did DEC minis and helped invent the quad core for Intel.
Very interesting perspective, but the machine is not old because we don't have any new hardware, but because of part of the environment. For example, creating a file and editing it. Most corporations run mostly legacy Applications on them. It does have pretty powerful tools,, but nobody is telling me JCL is a language with a modern syntax. It's also expensive to run and maintain. I know high-performance cloud-based solutions are expensive too. The consolidation 40:1 is just wishful thinking unless we are comparing a hierarchical problem running on a relational database on Linux vs IMS running the same problem on the mainframe, or a 15K Linux box against a million-dollar Mainframe platform.
why are you confident that 40:1 is wishful thinking? serious question not trying to be ass
@@QqQ-h5hDepends on the problem you're trying to solve. Mainframes still have their place, just as stacks of 1U linux PCs do. The "40:1" claim is an apples to staples comparison... the workloads mainframes typically do vs. the workloads typical of a PC.
I've not had to deal with a "mainframe" (AS/400) for over 20 years, and even then it was running 20 year old [telco] applications. Every one of the applications was eventually replaced with web applications on very cheap PC hardware. Metasolv for circuit design, custom stuff for trouble management, commercial apps for CRM and billing. All of it -- the software, machines, people -- cost less than we were paying EDS for a single month of mainframe time.
@@QqQ-h5h Yes outside the parameters I set. Cleary you can always find some toy problem that runs better that much better on the mainframe, but you can do the same with x86 or power.
There's still a skills shortage for classic "Z" as we are all old (or dead) but I guess this video is aimed at getting new customers on z hardware. In 1982 I was told "COBOL only has 5 years left" Nope.
There are some attempts to automate CBL code migration to Java and C# but I'm not sure if any big MF players are interested in this. I wish COBOL had more open-source tools available. Other than mostly closed ecosystem - COBOL is really solid and mature language (just like Pascal is solid and mature language). People who make fun of these two - never really touched them, or wrote anything, other than 'Hello world'.
If it's not expensive, why don't you explain how z/OS license price changes proportionately with CPU count... or how much a 64GB memory upgrade costs.... Oh, and the IBM cloud charges you a mere $5.28 per hour for a small z/OS VM...
This is not exactly true …
Because you have to compare other apples in the market .. in my experience it’s the cheapest number cruncher on the planet
It's.not expensive until you see the quotes from IBM.
where else are you going to find millisecond per year down times, and the type of rock solid stability offered by a mainframe?
are you comparing it to a rack full of standard servers and storage?
The mainframe isn’t even that expensive, it’s the software licenses from IBM
“Back in the day” I spend almost 40 years creating software for an IBM mainframe environment. I’ve seen the rise (and fall) of “minicomputers,” and the rise and proliferation of PC’s and networks. All are good, depending upon the task.
But like I like to say, “PC’s are fast, but Mainframes SCREAM with power.”
Long live Mainframes!
But I still like my PC (and iPhone, too)
All have their place .. the robustness reliability throughput security and value for money is there is match ? I don’t think
YoY apprx. 3-5% of the Mainframe Customers decommissioned their MF in Germany. Reason: Skill gap (Cobol, Assembler, PL/1, z/OS SysProg, Db2 and IMS skills etc.), Cost (24% MLC Increase of IBM Software and of course of the ISVs), Agility in Development. Each industry is affected (Insurance, Finance, Public, Retail, Automotive etc.). Good bye mainframe....
COBOL and JCL on an IBM 360 almost made me abandon my new career. Then, my dad convinced me to try out the AS/400. I have yet to meet anyone who has worked on this system who didn't love it. The health insurance system that ran on my first mainframe took a dozen people to maintain. On an iSeries, I could have done it by myself (part-time).
Thanks for the informative video! I learned a lot about mainframes - I didn’t realize their prevalence!
Basically it's a mainframe on steroids, occupies less space, flexibility in working in various cloud environments, conducive to applications development and maintenance
IBM mainframes had a reputation for being old and stodgy, even when I was a kid, but they are really impressive tech for their use case. What they were built to do, they do like no other system. And with Linux on z coexisting alongside z/OS on different LPARs on the same computer, mainframes are poised to bridge the world of modern tech with the world of applications that have been running since before hippies emerged. I find the mainframe platform fascinating.
I have been working on Mainframes from past 16 years for some of the world's finest banks, insurance and retails customers. Trust me there was not an single day in my 16 years I have seen it going down. Mainframe is and will be reliable and scalable. The best in the market.
I never understood why IBM was so intent on making mainframes seem affordable. They're not! And that's OK. You're paying (handsomely) for very specific benefits that are only worth it to a small portion of the overall compute market.
I also don't understand why IBM is intent on throwing every workload on these things. A lot will never work on z series, like commercial applications compiled for x86 for Windows/Linux, so you still have to have that platform running as well along side z in most cases. And your average DC workload, you can put it on an x86 blade system or similar for a *fraction* of what if would cost to run on z, and you can run a *much* wider variety of workloads on it to boot.
I don't hate mainframes, but they're great for only a small niche of workloads. For the rest, they're just overly expensive.
I like this explanation. Excellent video
for the tools depends. A lot of companies simply does not want to spend money for best tools so basically you continue with old way of programming. In that sense ibm can help with more affordable way to use modern tools ...
As a retired sysprog, when I think mainframe, I think RACF. I know it has been renamed but it's still the BEST.
ALL the other features would be in danger without it.
I remember PROFS, an office app that ran on the big iron. I was at IBM Canada, in the late 90s, when we were moving to Lotus Notes, for pretty much the same things as could be done with PROFS.
Great video!!!! THanks Rosalind!
IBM should look to what DEC (RIP) did that kept VMS/OpenVMS alive as long as it has been... The Hobbyist Community. I'd love to play with z/OS myself, but IBM has refused to allow access to it via Hercules - not because it won't run on it, but simply licensing. If IBM made the technology accessible to the hobbyist community, they'd probably not have to make videos like this to convince people that z/OS platform is good, they'd have a lot of folks that would do that work for them and for free. I'd be willing to bet that there would be tons of "how-to" videos on z/OS and those extolling it's virtues if it were made available for the hobbyist community... Just my 2 cents worth...
I worked on Mainframes until the early 90s and then again 1998 with millennium issues. Moved onto UNIX/Oracle then Windows SQL Server. On the mainframe you needed so many more staff toto the same job. DBAs, System Programmers, operations staff etc. how has this been rationalised?
What goes around comes around. The issue isn't that mainframes are outdated, but the business requirements the fill are becoming more niche. Back in the 1970s, 1980s mainframes were needed for nearly every large organization to handle rather simple (in todays standards) form apps. Then PC came affordable and performed faster per user than the mainframe, for the basic form/small data number crunching. Then we went to centralized databases where mainframes became more useful, then PC hardware became good enough to run most small to midsized scale databaes. The Internet began to boom, where larger mainframe systems could handle the load of hundreds of connections a second, then PC Distributed hardware servers came out to handle a lot of this action... The real question isnt if the mainframe is better, but is it cheaper inital cost system good enough. As most companies need to budget for short term needs and large single expense even if it will offer a lower TCO is a tough sell to management.
I'm a fresher just graduated got an apprenticeship in a bank they put me on mainframe learning tract is it fun and more importantly does it pay well.
Utterly awesome technology, just wish the price of entry was lower ...
Thx. for the Video. I am an old mainframe developer. :)
I think it was IBM that pioneered Virtualization on mainframes. Am I correct?
The hardware is pretty reasonably priced for enterprise gear. But the z/OS licence costs are insane.
z machine rocks!!!
What people think is "Cloud" is still so incorrect. It isn't containers or virtualisation. Cloud is the use of commodity applications services provided over the network with a consumption based pricing model. Running your own kit and running containers is no more cloud than using a Cpanel host in 2005.
Wonderful presentation, congratulations!
Is she using poorly designed windows server data centers for her numbers?
Non-Windows servers have put hundreds of “systems” in 1/4 - 1/2 rack for decades; hundreds of CPU’s, gigs to terabytes of RAM/cache.
Mainframe and regular servers usually put storage in other racks so not counting that.
You use mainframes to kick I/O ass and satisfy regulatory financials; everything else went to commodity racks a long time ago.
thanks a lot, for share this knowledge.
She writes backwards flawlessly.
See ibm.biz/write-backwards
That's such a great comparison mainframe is not going anywhere it just kept optimised on a daily basis and most 500 fortune companies using mainframe....we don't have enough talent to work in mainframe technology ....there is huge shortage companies are facing they need skilled mainframe developer
I’m impressed that she can write backwards!
I picture most people with mainframe skills are 50+ years old. No younger people get into IT to be a mainframe jockey.
When IBM hits you with hardware and licensing costs and you recover from that shock, a data center full of super micro or other brand of Linux servers looks reasonable in comparison.
Fear of becoming unemployable has discouraged many young people from getting obscure mainframe skills. This is similar to the problem of persuading people to learn my favourite computer language ada.
Punch cards forever! 🙂
Actually, many skills are the same or similar. Is there much of a difference in working with Linux or web servers on mainframes, compared to PCs?
Is PL1 still available? JCL? MVS?
Yup .. JCL is job control language so always available MVS Stands for Multiple Virtual system which the OS of Mainframe so yes still kicking 😂
my fantasy is to get a job at a bank where I can learn COBOL and work on mainframes and legacy systems. I'd like to learn assembly too.
If you need low latency, ultra secure, and maximum flexibility, Z is the solution.
Hello everyone, I have 5 years of experience in Mainframe and took a break in 2015. Now I’m running a restaurant. I always wanted to go back to IT. What course would you recommend to update my resume and find a job? Please help
Are you still looking?
Yes but, mainframe are still use to run applications develops in the 80’s and 90’s, COBOL, IMS, DB2, CICS, Assembler and those skills are not teach anymore, yes the computer is powerful, but that’s not how they are use.
The skillset was taken a back up in India by service based companies.every 5/10 IT professional is mainframer in India.
Interesting
When did On-Site or In-House get replaced by On-Prem.?
5 years or so ago. (let's say 2015 to be safe) It's just like the now ubiquitous "Cloud". (i.e. "someone else's computer")
I see IBM mainframes can run openshift, but can they also run other k8s flavours? Rancher? Vanilla k8s? Google managed GKE with Anthos? 😊
She, at least, has the skill to write with her left hand from right to left in mirror.
Perhaps that is needed to be an expert on Mainframes as well.
My biggest concern, no matter how unarguably awesome those systems are: Vendor lock in.
Your entire system is in the hand of one and only one company.
And companies sometimes make stupid decisions.
BWT: I'd love to work on a z system.
She is writing normally. They flip the image so we can read it.
Lock in, not like Microsoft? Oracle? Your statement is hilarious.
Shouldn't we factor in all the vulnerabilities of x86-64 targeted by ccp and kremlin state sponsored actors?
In school I wrote in IBM assembly. I'm sure the instruction set has evolved but is it still based on on that instruction set? I've heard that the modern systems can still run software from 60 years ago. I don't think thats a bad thing btw.
actually i think about ibm when i hear mainframe
IBM has lost the ability to market its stuff so its name is losing its presence in the market space
Mainframe is all good if you have niche needs. But 99,5% people/companies don't have those needs.
What is niche ? Like custom needs or distributed applications what is it
@@RahulSinha-l5uMost companies especially small to mid size are ok with the downsize of horizontal scaling.
Mainframe is a vertically scaled system and is extremely expensive up front with long term risk of vendor lock in and lack of talent.
Additionally centrally managed system is not as flexible. You can spin up linux clusters in minute but getting a CICS region on z/OS created can take weeks as you need sign off from capacity / network socket / DB2 / MQ / etc.
What could someone who wanted a mainframe for personal use do with it?
Spend a lot of money to heat their house
If you want to play around but don't want the power bill, there's a simulator ("hercules") that will run on most platforms / OSes.
When your application absolutely, positively needs to run without interruption. You can add/swap CPU, disks, memory and any other components on the fly. Yes, it is expensive.
Is she printing backwards? Well done!
See ibm.biz/write-backwards
In 1980 the IBM 3033 cost $3,000,000. That was with ONE CPU. IBM talked about channels but never gave a good explanation of what they were. I presume they were I/O processors taking that workload off of the single CPU. It was possible to get 2 CPUs on the 3033 but then the price went up significantly.
Mainframes no longer exist people just keep using the word. IBM did not use the word 'minicomputer', that was for scum like, DEC and Data General.
The things called mainframes today are massive collections of microprocessors with great attention and effort put into reliability and redundancy. The true Big Iron is gone.
There was a benchmark program in the Jan 1983 BYTE Magazine that tested lots of computers and languages. The 3033 running assembly language beat all comers. I rewrote that program years ago in 'C'. I recently purchased a used Dell Optiplex with a Core i7. I estimate it is about 70 times as powerful as a 3033 and that is ignoring the inefficiency of the compiled code.
What a difference 40+ years can make.
@@IBMTechnology
I am not aware of any technology in history that has changed like micro-electronics.
I did not mention that the $3 million 3033 had 8 megabytes of memory and the used Dell was $150 with 16 Gigabytes of memory.
20,000 times less money and 2,000 times as much memory while not taking inflation into account.
The real power of the MF is in its I/O, not necessarily raw compute ability. But IBM putting an "AI Engine" in the latest CPU may be seen as a vein attempt to stay relevant. No one is going to buy an expensive, massive z-system for AI/ML that can already be done in a 2U system for 1% the cost -- and it's WAY faster... IBM isn't known for their GPUs!
Last mainframe I programmed was a 3033, supporting about 5000 terminals.
A channel is an I/o pathway to a device, so you can interact with things like disk, tape, printers etc off a channel. But a channel is more than a PCI slot, channels have brains. So you can instruct an I/o to do a data transfer with (effectively) parameters telling the device what to do, the SCC instruction if I remember correctly, and when the I/o is completed, your thread is resumed.
Most folks never need to dig this deep, there are higher level commands that hide this detail. If you are not a system programmer, then playing with channel commands is just for fun.
A 3033 probably has less computational ability than a smartphone, definitely less memory, but you can’t hang 5000 users off a smartphone. The power of the old school mainframes was the autonomous power of the peripherals, keeping as much work as possible off the CPU.
I did worrk on a 3033 at ibm in 1982, theses io processors was named director if i m not mistaken,and you re right they process io to freeup the core cpu of theses duties, the fact is the channels that was behind, managing data exchanges with disk etc was having high bandwith, 5 MB/s if i m not mistaken,a lot in 1982 where drives was sized at 300 mo, but in high numbers.
Bravo!
Sadly in many Companys Projects hast been Setup to leave the Mainframe. Also you get less young people been interested learning mainframe. Projects are mostly Planned Not on Mainframe Management people learned Linux or Cloud in there Studium. And that ist what they Push..because they think to now the advantages.
IT would be helpful when IBM would Support Mini Z/Os Installations on Windows. I remeber Herculess Emulator what helps me a Lot getting closer to z/os. Make It avail for students.
I have faith in IBM
A mainframe is simply a computer system that isn't designed to be used by just one person at a time.
I appreciate the effort, but you have to know what the myths are before you debunk them. You should interview a developer who grew up with PCs to find that out. I still have no idea how it's structurally different from a huge multicore PC, where the "batch processing" comes in (does it still?), why the AS/400 text interface (still?) seems to be the norm.
So I am achieving over 100 GFlop/s on a Ryzen 9 processor. That is less than $5/GFlop. How does the Telum processor compare at $/GFlops ?
Thats 100 billion floating point operations per second on a $500 processor. Think about that !
Still expensive
I think IBM mainframes are things of buty, row machine power highly optimized hardware to run very and very big tasks and you can mine crypto, but the best use for mainframe in my experiance are running complex datasets and like filter trough them for valuable data.
So how much does a mainframe cost these days? Videos tell how much mainframes cost in past years, but EVERYONE wants to keep the price of todays mainframes a secret. To me that is as important a spec as processing power.
Don't put all your eggs in one basket
Nice marketing. They aren't "myths". Show of hands: how many people are submitting python jobs to their mainframe? (not running scripts in a linux image on the MF.) how many are still running COBOL (or FORTRAN) that was originally written decades ago?
Most people run mainframes because they always have. The applications / workloads they run can't be retooled for anything else. (time, money, proven reliability, etc. etc.) [COBOL is really hard to translate into anything sensible.] The claims of "40:1", power and space efficiency are "lies, damned lies, and statistics." For the cost of one modern (z16) MF -- and _licenses_ -- I can *build* a small data center. (the last one... the power cost less than half what IBM charges for a single z/OS VM.)
Show of hand - I am running Fortran code daily. On HPC clusters
Is Mainframe old? Yes.. Is it old tech? No bra.. It's the same as saying 'planes are old' .. yeah they are around for a quite a time.
👍🏾
75% more efficient compared to what?
On presumes, racks of intel processors.
the real question is, can it run Kubernetes??
The Myth is that licensing costs are insane.....well they are.....also mainframes are for specific workloads and legacy code. Nothing else....
How do I go and try out a mainframe? Say VM (z/VM?). Thank you.
Hercules mainframe emulator
So many negative comments from people desperate to show the world the depths of their ignorance, it makes me sad.
Is C#, .NET supported?
How about perl? That's as old as mainframes. :-)
Python on Mainframe
So not much of a difference between todays mainframe, and a big 2u server (or multiple 2U servers).. So really the myth is the mainframe which means they are old big expensive boxes from the past. Your Zbox is really nothing more than a consolidation of 2U/3U/4U servers in a pretty IBM custom rack, with some IBM boiler plate gluing it all together. . meh... Everything mentioned here I can do on my old Dell R815 box. so meh meh...
Funny... I have an R815 on the corner of my desk. (off currently... it's a bit loud) 48 cores, ~200G? RAM; uses about 200W most of the time. (DRAC set to 400W limit.) I've never run payroll on the thing, so I can't compare it to a MF. ;-)
Can't run Fortran
Does she know how to write backwards?
See ibm.biz/write-backwards
Never fails … upward migration paths are simple
nobody listed
Here's another myth debunked. That most people don't know this. Problem is that most people can't afford a modern mainframe.
What a weirdly defensive presentation.
This is nonsense and explains nothing. Mainframes maybe do have their uses, but it is rarely performance. It is more about paranoid security and redundancy at all levels, it is about legacy software. Google doing 60k transactions per second. Taken from who knows where. I worked there, and I can tell you we were doing 60 billions of transactions per second years ago.
Meh… One way marketing video is about as old as the Mainframe itself; sure people still use it, but modern theory runs away from it at first opportunity.
If i run a bank then mainframe is the winning key
Is she writing sdrawkcab on the fly?
See ibm.biz/write-backwards
90% of the words she used…..I did not understand….. oh dear….😞
i need to write a program to compare two files ,while in linux side i did in command itself.....
z/OS has diff too, and IEBCOMPR and ISRSUPC
Glorified advertisement
And you‘re running it on prem… shure.😂