O'Reilly On The Importance Of The Mainframe Heritage 62
theodp writes "After exchanging e-mail with mainframe software pioneer Mario Morino, Tim O'Reilly writes 'It's important for the open source community to look more at the software heritage of the mainframe era.' O'Reilly might want to take a look at how Marino's own MICS software has been used since the 80's to automatically charge IBM mainframe users for printed material that could be ordered from PC clients with a single action by using billing and shipping information that was previously stored on a Mainframe server. The whole process might seem oddly familiar."
So... (Score:2)
Something that would make for a nice "on the weekend" toy...
Re:So... (Score:5, Interesting)
I could have gotten my hands on an old MicroVAX in this manner, but when I figured out the performance (or lack thereof) I would be getting, the lack of any real support resources when/if the thing broke, and most importantly -- the estimated electricity usage -- I smiled and declined.
It _would_ have been cool, though.
Cutler's Windows NT Team... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
Not necessarily; it all depends how old the machine is. I remember a time (back when the Earth was newly-cooled, and Real Programmers got their assembly-coding done while trying not to get eaten by dinosaurs...) a shop I worked at decommissioned a Burroughs B3700.
The contractors were only too happy to take it away, as there was enough 3/4 inch-thick silver cable under the floor to fill a small truck. I'm pretty sure they would not have lost money on that operation.
Re:So... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:2, Interesting)
If you're lucky enough to get an s390 you can run debian, otherwise...welcome cobol, jcl, batch, ebcdic and perhaps interactive mode...
As for price, I dunno.
Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
In IBM land the generations go like this:
S/360 series.. the OG of the mainframe world, these are what you think of when you think of government and scientific computers of the 60's. They are notable because they are the first "modular" computers, meaning they weren't custom made 1-off jobs, but you could still upgrade the proccessing and i/o power as you need and afford it.
S/370's replaced the s/360's and were used up thru the late 70's 80's and still a few operate into the 90's. At work we use s/370 era hardware and disks. You know tape reels, 200 meg 3480 18-track tape drives, IBM "infowindow" and 3178c terminals, and stuff. These things were built like tanks and have been running practicly 24/7 for 15-20 years.
S/390's are the modern versions, which is what we use for the actual computer power... All modern mainframes from IBM are these.
SO... you could probably get one fairly cheap as far as IBM mainframes go, but good luck finding parts and your going to need to a power supply (from the power company) on the same level as a small apartment building. Oh, don't forget the several thousand dollars a months for the OS's and such, but if you got a s/370 or later you can run linux on it!!! (still have to run a IBM OS though to run the linux OS).
Pretty expensive for the same proccessing power of a 486 PC. Put I/O is still unparralelled for the modern stuff .
Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:So... (Score:1)
Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
There realy is a big difference. A server is designed for serving other computers, providing services and small to large files... a mainframe is a standalone thing, maybe with a couple supporting PC's to aid in network functions and stuff like that.
Mainframes are dinasours. Tiny brains, big bodies. You have the central housing for the cpu, but then each device has a disk controller that controls and operates each peice of equipment...
Think of it like a video card, but instead of crunching 3-d stuff it's crunching I/O, each device (the controller for a bank of tape drives, or disks) operates itself and the central computer just tells the bits were to go, it stays out of the loop as much as possible.
A example would be:
This 3,000,000 phone numbers get added to existing records and sorted to the zip code, and sent to this disk volume, then gets divided by state, then each state volume gets backed up into tape drives for backups... Then a week later a client wants at least 4000 records from wisconson that represent people who are male, make over 30,000 dollars and are bow hunters. You find 1200, but then they want more so you add some zip codes searches from surround communities and find enough records. They pay for the records and then you zip the volumes into a single file print out a hardcopy of it's contents and it gets ftp'ed to the client's print company for mass mail flyers.
Don't need much cpu power for those jobs, but you need tremendous thrurougput to do this and 8 other jobs like that at the same time. Mostly it's shuffling data around and appending records.
That is the world of mainframes...
Even the brand new s/390's (t-rex stuff) getting stomped on in terms of proccessing power compared to the power4 servers....
Supercomputers on the other hand can do tremendous amounts of I/O AND have lots of proccessing power. so they can do complex mathmatics with large amounts of data on a tremendious speed. Both a high-end server and a mainframe would choke on that.
So that's the difference between a high-end server(lots of cpu power), a mainframe(lots of I/O power), and a supercomputer(mega lots of both).
Re:So... (Score:2)
Re:So... (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.conmicro.cx/hercules/
Stu
Re:So... (Score:1)
http://www.conmicro.cx/hercules/
Yeah, the hercules is great, even better though is the Tur(n)key system [bsp-gmbh.com] where you can find an mvs system to run atop of the herc. They've done a pretty good job of packaging it, so the install will set up all the DASD and create an ipl volume for you.
Re:So... (Score:1)
Any Suggestions? (Score:2)
Prolong? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Prolong? (Score:4, Informative)
Meanwhile, you have only to look at the way that folks like Red Hat are trying to gain increasing control over their users to see the commercial dynamics that I'm talking about. RH as a commercial business isn't that different from a proprietary software company -- you should have seen Robert Lefkowitz (r0ml)'s talk at OScon, where he compared Red Hat's P&L to Borland's -- and you could see that from a financial pov they were nearly identical, except that what Borland called "licenses", Red Hat called "subscriptions." Leading r0ml to a wonderful slide called "Sharia Compliant Mortgages", which showed some of the creative accounting used in Islamic countries to get around the Islamic law prohibition on charging interest.
These things are always more complex than they appear. No simple answers. But that's what makes it fun.
Open source is great, but the choice between open and proprietary is not going to end up with an either-or solution.
It will never happen. (Score:3, Interesting)
All the interesting problems will have been solved *in that area* and so the hackers will move on to new areas.
With all due respect, I think you are seriously underestimating something--maybe the nature of hackers, maybe the nature of problems--if you believe that it is possible to solve "all the interesting problems" in any field of human endevour whatsoever.
For example, if you look at any ancient "problem space" you will find people still devoting their lives attacking problems that they find interest
Prior art... (Score:4, Informative)
So this provides evidence of prior art to claims 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25 of the Bezos patent [uspto.gov]. It may also provide prior art to claims 7, 9, 14 and 15 - does anyone know whether there is a web interface to this system and if so whether it existed before September 12, 1997?
It looks like the only thing Bezos has patented is the act of purchasing an item over the 'net by the '...speaking of a sound...' (claim 4, claim 18), and that's technology he hasn't implemented.
Re:Prior art... (Score:2)
"whereby the item is ordered without using a shopping cart ordering model."
I don't think MICS used a shopping cart ordering model, though I could be wrong. If it doesn't then it wouldn't qualify as prior art (according to USC 102) for claims 1 and 6. The claims 2, 3, 5, 8, and 10 are are dependent on claims 1 and 6 (10 is dependent on 9 which also has the shopping cart limitation). Unless you can throw out the independet claims 1, 6 and 9 you can't touch the claims that are dependent
Re:Prior art... (Score:1)
However, it still applies to claim 6 ("a shopping cart ordering component that in response to performance of an add-to-shopping-cart action, sends a request to the server system to add the item to a shopping cart.") and claim 9 and their respective dependent claims.
Re:Prior art... (Score:1)
Re: Web Interface Question... (Score:2)
Here's a 1990 post discussing ISPF access [google.com] using tn3270 (a 3270 terminal emulator running with tcp/ip transport) via the internet. And this 1996 press release [netscape.com] announced Netscape's licensing of IBM's Host On-Demand, a Java-based tn3270 solution that provided 3270 terminal emulation for intranet and Web users and was integrated into Netscape 4.0.
Re: More on Web Interface Question... (Score:2)
Mainframes were the foundation of Prodigy (Score:5, Informative)
How to know when Linux really makes it (Score:1, Funny)
Reading the header, the article, and some of the links made me realize how you can recognize when Linux really "makes it" in an organization:
Linux has really "made it" when the sysadmins have to run system accounting to generate chargebacks for compute resources used on the Linux box.
Re:How to know when Linux really makes it (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How to know when Linux really makes it (Score:4, Insightful)
Knee-jerk Linux advocacy isn't any better than unthinking opposition to Linux. I actually think its worse. When someone simply opposes Linux, there is probably another solution that either already works, or could be reasonably expected to work on Unix or Windows. An unthinking Linux advocate may push a solution which is unworkable.
I recently had a discussion with a coworker who though that Linux would be the best OS to use on an Itanium server. I found to be an astonishing view. For our industry there is a growing amount of vendor software that runs on Itanium.... under HP/UX. Hundreds of packages run under HP/UX, but I can only think of about 2 that run under Linux. Linux would clearly be a poor choice for us, and yet that was the automatic answer from my coworker. After some additional discussion it turned out that he didn't really know about the applications, but basically assumed that Linux could do it. I think that is way too common among Linux users.
Frankly, contrary to you, I think Linux will have made it when it is questioned (like every other IT/engineering solution should be) and chosen as the best solution for the problem, and not because
RMS (Score:2, Informative)
who was the one who stood up to consiously prolong the golden age of sharing.
Re:Ill advise. (Score:1)
If anyone did accuse copyright infringement on ancient mainframe stuff, a simple look at the code would cure any doubt.
IBM's version of usenet (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a toolie from way back with a few contributions of my own, SEARCH, a flat file database query tool (used Boyer-Moore string search to make it real fast), and REACC/QUACC, a command that let you determine whether a R/O CMS disk had changed and needed to be reaccessed.
Also some that never got off the ground. I had this idea to emulating temporary files without doing actual i/o to disks. Couldn't call it virtual i/o since there was already a mainframe i/o method called that. I described it to a friend who said oh yeah, unix has those, they're called file pipes. !!? This is the late 70's or very early 80's when unix was basically unknown at IBM. So a first for unix in that case. File pipes were cool and I was probably the only one who had them on mainframes at that time.
So yeah, other than that, we mainframe guys invented everything first. But we never believed the stories told by those ex Future Systems guys. They claimed they invented everything first.
Might have been collabarative but it wasn't open (Score:5, Interesting)
They were huge though, we often had more than 400 programmers working on the one system, each working on their own little corner (well you prayed you didn't overlap). The banks and insurance companies had even bigger teams.
I am vaguely aware that the DECUS (DEC user group) kept VMS going on their own while Digital then Compaq then HP tried to decide if it was profitable or not. I think the obstinate customers who insist on something reliable have swayed HP now. Corporate policy is something like: "as long as you don't cost us any money, you can do what you want". They might change their minds if they see a profit in it again.
Re:Might have been collabarative but it wasn't ope (Score:4, Interesting)
I recall the huge uproar when IBM decided to withdraw access to the source. It was called their "Object Code Only" (OCO) policy and users were outraged. I still have some of the coke can wrappers passed out at a users group meeting making fun simultaneously of OCO and New Coke. (From a Google search, found this [yahoo.com] which references Feb. 8th, 1983 as the date of the OCO announcement.
There was a very active community within the major IBM users groups such as SHARE [share.org], sharing modifications to the systems. The best collection at the time was the CBT Mods Tape [cbttape.org] which was originally assembled by a Systems Programmer at Connecticut Bank and Trust. I guess it doesn't suprise me that it still exists (Thanks Google!) as it was an invaluable tool back when I was still involved with mainframes.
Re:Might have been collabarative but it wasn't ope (Score:1)
What planet are you on? VMS makes a huge amount of money.
Just look at Intel, they use VMS to fab all their processors, they might be a little irrated to discover cHumPaq killed VMS.
Obstinacy and VMS (Score:3, Informative)
These guys also pay for 24x7 support - lots of cash. HPaq suddenly found that they had a little gold mine.
Even earlier. (Score:5, Interesting)
What Open Software has Tim O'Reilly written? (Score:3, Informative)
"Anybody who works for free is a slave."
-- Mr. T, on the Howard Stern Show, regarding
the unauthorized use of footage portraying
his character in a comedic fashion in
Best Buy commercials
Anybody who suggests that IBM mainframe software mirrored the open source movement should go back and check the prices on those mainframes and the prices of the service contracts. They weren't cheap, and hardware prices subsidized the paychecks of those software groups, which were relatively few in number. In other words, they could AFFORD to be "open source". That isn't the case today, and lots of business people and naive software developers are going belly-up trying to pursue the unachievable dream. Some will succeed, and they will tout themselves as examples that "the model works." You will never hear from the legions who abandoned their projects, and who never made a dime because they will be modded down as a "Troll" on Slashdot. (Just look at all the criticisms Cmdr Taco got when he open sourced some of his Slashdot code.)
By the way, mainframe manufacturers had a funny trick. They would ship all of their mainframes with all the necessary hardware for both basic (cheaper) and advanced (more expensive) machines. However, the basic machines had the advanced portions disabled. If a client wanted to upgrade, a technician would be sent out with great fanfare and would generally close the door behind him as he worked. He would only really need a screwdriver and a couple of minutes to get the proper cards in place. Keep that door closed! In other words, it's something that the clients could have done themselves, but of course, it was more profitable for the mainframe companies to charge big bucks for the upgrade.
The advent of CrippleWare!
"I pity the fool."
- Mr. T, anywhere and everywhere.
Re:What Open Software has Tim O'Reilly written? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What Open Software has Tim O'Reilly written? (Score:5, Interesting)
A generalisation: some machines were engineered that way, more commonly as LSI came in during the 1980's. But the customers weren't entirely ignorant about it: it wasn't primarily a technical issue, but a matter of contracts and resourses - factors that members of /.'s army of part-time boy programmers may eventually understand when they've had to earn their living in the trade for a few years.
Sure - if they had their own engineering organisation, trained to maintain the machines they used, and were willing to take full responsibility for any and all unanticipated consequences of what they did. You needed to be a pretty big organisation with pretty unusual requirements for that to be worthwhile.The vendors charged what they reckoned the market would bear. Big customers did better than small ones. Another aspect of the mainframe era that is being repeated today - I'm sure I don't have to give any clues about the particular platforms and products involved.
Dr Hu - who worked with mainframes as recently as the early 1990s.
Re:What Open Software has Tim O'Reilly written? (Score:3, Insightful)
I've heard of a wage slave (working at a wage) but not a hobby slave (Working for free).
I understand his position given the situation. He did not consent to the situation so it's more a case of theft. (The fact that your not being paid dosen't change the fact that the payment was the reason you did the work).
You have hit on something very much key to this.
The reason this early open source worked was becouse the pirces of the mainframs did
Re:What Open Software has Tim O'Reilly written? (Score:2)
Or (more likely) a volunteer.
Re:What Open Software has Tim O'Reilly written? (Score:2)
A few points. For one, O'Reilly has done the equivilant with books available for free on the website or for pay to get a printed copy. They have been successful with that so far. So at the least it's not a case of the advocate being unwilling to take the advice.
For another, it's hardly surprising to see businesses trying the Open Source/Free software model fail. That's mostly because it's hardly surprising to see a new business using any model fail. Most new businesses fail. The common wisdom is that a bu