Happy birthday to the IBM mainframe computer

[NickStone]

I have just read an article that says that the IBM mainframe computer is celebrating it's 50th "birthday" (anniversary) and Britains answer to the IBM mainframe from ICL is celebrating 50 later this year.

Here's the full article http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26886579

Before System 360 arrived, businesses bought a computer, wrote programs for it and then when it got too old or slow they threw it away and started again from scratch," he said.

Does this remind you of actions from a certain Seattle software company?

[jlittle]

I thought the article was excessively simplistic. People didn't throw their software away, in most cases they recompiled it, is all. It is remarkable that there's 50 years of some binary compatibility, but whether that's a good thing is debatable. IME mainframes are lousy at most computing tasks; they're only good for preserving investments in systems and expertise. If some organization is building a new system from scratch, they don't target mainframes, and that's been true for decades.

Regards, John Little

[GreyGeek]

I agree, jlittle. Their "history" was not the way I remember it. Fortan IV was introduced in 1957, two years before I graduated from Highschool and began attending Barnes School of Business in Denver, CO to study "data processing". The "heavy iron" back then was the IBM 402 tabulator, gang punch and other peripherals. The 402 weighed over a ton, hence the term "heavy iron", which all early mainframes became known as. COBOL was released in 1960 as COBOL 60. In grad school in 1968 I took a class called "Numerical Analysis" in which Fortran IV on a CDC6600 mainframe was used. Fortran IV was commonly used before COBOL and was portable across most mainframes. Folks just didn't "throw away" their code when they replaced their hardware with faster/better mainframes. In the early 1980s I installed Baby System 360's which used COBOL and RPG IV as the programming tools, and taught classes on the languages. But, I HATED COBOL with a passion because I had learned Turbo Basic 3.02A and UCSD Pascal on my Apple and compared to them COBOL was a model T with a hand crank. That's why I couldn't get into Java, it reminded me too much of COBOL in its verbosity.