Ars Technica has a great article about the IBM mainframe.
Mainframe computers are often seen as ancient machines—practically dinosaurs. But mainframes, which are purpose-built to process enormous amounts of data, are still extremely relevant today. If they’re dinosaurs, they’re T-Rexes, and desktops and server computers are puny mammals to be trodden underfoot.
It’s estimated that there are 10,000 mainframes in use today. They’re used almost exclusively by the largest companies in the world, including two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, 45 of the world’s top 50 banks, eight of the top 10 insurers, seven of the top 10 global retailers, and eight of the top 10 telecommunications companies. And most of those mainframes come from IBM.
In this explainer, we’ll look at the IBM mainframe computer—what it is, how it works, and why it’s still going strong after over 50 years.
Whenever I see anything about mainframes, I think of that one time an 18 year old decided to buy a mainframe off eBay to run at home, and did an amazing presentation about the experience.
I only got to dabble with big iron. Mainly COBOL and Easytrieve stuff. JCL code is weird. Even compared to RPG400.
SQL/400 is my one and only connection to anything bigger than standard rackmount hardware. When I was in college our database programming class was centered on AS/400 machines since that’s where a lot of the local industry was at technologically speaking, and it was a community college. The instructor had the server taking up one corner of the classroom, and we all would remote into it from Windows 2000 workstations using terminal client software. It was definitely not “fun” in the traditional sense for most of the students, but I had a blast exploring the OS/400 system as far as my limited user account would allow me to.
Good times. I remember Client Access on Win95. lol
I programmed in Powerhouse also. Sadly, It is all forgotten memories at this point.
Of course, if we trust IBM and it’s own data, the mainframe is dying. And Red Hat is what’s propping the company up now.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/21/red-hat-ibm-earnings/
I do not know where you get that from the article: “On the bright side, software revenues were up 7.2% in IBM’s most recent quarter to $6.6 billion with Red Hat leading the way up 11%, making the $34 billion purchase in 2018 look better with each passing quarter. You could even argue that without Red Hat, IBM would be in much worse shape.”
I read it as Redhat is responsible for only 11% of IBM software sales.
NaGERST,
Really? I thought chriscox surmised it well. If you read it again do you still feel there’s a discrepancy between the article and how chriscox’s comment?
I think it means redhat is up 11%, helping to bring IBM up 7.2% despite losses on the mainframe side.
To be fair, most of the infrastructure providers took a hit the past couple of quarters.
“Big iron” ironically is some of the systems that take the least amount of space/volume in a data center. I think their market is reduced mainly down to critical transaction processing. Even though it is still a huge margin market, it not as big as back in the day, when mainframes covered a lot of general high-end compute and data processing. The mainframe is likely to really never “die,” as there will always be a need for ultra reliable transaction systems (especially for financial, insurance, etc) so it will always be a “safe” market for IBM, just not a growing one.
IBM went from being the dominant player in the IT business, to a very stagnant organization (in terms of size/revenue). So they seem to mimic the trajectory of the mainframe market ;-). Red Hat seems to be one of the few divisions that has done growth for them.