NASA Shuts Down Its Last Mainframe

[pokerfan]

I cut my eyeteeth on IBM mainframes and keypunching...

Sittra Battle of the Marshall Space Flight Center shuts down NASA's last mainframe computer. Credit: NASA

NASA has just powered down its last mainframe computer. Umm, everyone remembers what a mainframe computer is, right? Well, you certainly must recall working with punched cards, paper tape, and/or magnetic tape, correct? That does sound a little archaic. “But all things must change,” wrote Linda Cureton on the NASA CIO blog. “Today, they are the size of a refrigerator but in the old days, they were the size of Cape Cod.”


An IBM 704 mainframe from 1964.

The last mainframe being used by NASA, the IBM Z9 Mainframe, was being used at the Marshall Space Flight Center. Cureton described the mainframe as a “ big computer that is known for being reliable, highly available, secure, and powerful. They are best suited for applications that are more transaction oriented and require a lot of input/output – that is, writing or reading from data storage devices.”

More: http://www.universetoday.com/93580/nasa-shuts-down-its-last-mainframe-computer/

[TheWraith]

1. I hope they're auctioning those off.

The historical value would make them a great find for a museum or collector.

[sinkingfeeling]

3. Z9s are still being reconditioned and resold by 3rd. party vendors. Nothing historic about

them.

[Glassunion]

6. Agreed...

That last mainframe at NASA cannot be more than 6 1/2 years old.

Hell, where I work we just shutdown our last one. An S/390 made in 1991.

It's so much more quiet in the computer room without the tape drives, printer and network processor.

When I started here we were using 3 S/370s with two reel-to-reels. It was like having 3 VW vans parked in the computer room.

[sinkingfeeling]

8. Wow, with our DS8100 and tape libraries, it's almost deadly quiet on our side of the

computer room. The noise comes from the 'open systems' side. Their disk storage device sounds like it's crushing rocks! They also have a problem with their multitude of 'servers' over heating the room temperature.

I just wish folks understood that mainframes still drive about 80% of all business in the world. The world's largest retailer has literally dozens of them.

[sinkingfeeling]

2. I've still got 3 of them sitting downstairs. Two Z10s and a Z990.

[Warpy]

4. The best thing about the jobs around those 1964 mainframes

was the air conditioning. A lot of them still had vacuum tubes here and there and they had to be kept cool.

[yodermon]

5. good for NASA, but mainframes ain't goin' nowhere. n/t

[HopeHoops]

7. Considering I've got more power in my laptop than any of those, I can see why.

They SUCK ELECTRICITY!!!! They're museum bait, not collector bait. Would you want to power up one of those? The fucking meter would spin off its spindle.

[sinkingfeeling]

9. Absoluetely wrong. Your laptop cannot even come close. And besides will it run

24/7 for a couple of years without a 'reboot'? Let me know when your laptop can process 52,000 Million Instructions per Second.

[HopeHoops]

10. Yeah, good point. It is running Vista - spends most of its time dealing with THAT.

Now the desktop is another issue. It's on Win 7, i7 6-core at 3.33GHz with 24GB of RAM and about 9TB of disk space. MIPS isn't the only measure of power. People wondered why VisiCalc was faster on an Apple II (where it was developed) than on the first IBM PC. Think about it. A 1MHz 6502 has a minimum instruction time of 2 cycles and a maximum of 14 (averaging around 6 in reality). The 8088/8086 chips at 4.77MHz had a MINIMUM of 14 cycles and a maximum of 156 with an average of about 86. Literally apples to oranges.

[sinkingfeeling]

11. The Z196's 96 microprocessors run at 5.2GHz and can run anything from

Windows to Z/OS at the same time. It has up to 3TB of internal memory and just about unlimited disk space.

[HopeHoops]

12. We're not talking 1964 here, are we.

[muriel_volestrangler]

13. As already pointed out, the Z9 is less than 7 years old

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_z9

The 1964 picture was to illustrate one of the first mainframes of modern design.

[sinkingfeeling]

14. No, we're talking current stuff like your laptop and my mainframe.

[HopeHoops]

15. Sorry. I picked up on the post about 1964.

[sinkingfeeling]

16. It's OK, you do realize that in 1964 there were no laptops or PCs at all. So there

was very little to compete with the S/360.

[HopeHoops]

17. Yeah, I know. But my laptop can kick the shit out of anything around back then!!!

I started with an early 70's HP calculator with 10 registers and 560 or so instructions. That's how I learned to flowchart.

[sinkingfeeling]

19. Yeah, but I love my mainframes! Started out key-punching for a 1401

system and then went into RPG programming. Was hired by IBM in 1973 and went on to support mainframes for 30 years. Retired from them in 2003 and now work as a system programmer for my Z/OS systems.

[HopeHoops]

20. You've got a few years on me. I still miss machine code.

[MineralMan]

18. Me, too. Took a Fortran class in 1963.

Our class projects ran on an IBM 1620, in the middle of the night. Working on a card punch machine improved my typing accuracy, for sure. Mistakes took a long time to fix, since we just got our cards back the next day if the program didn't run properly. Uff da!

[Odin2005]

21. I thought comercial supercomputers were still called "mainframes"?