
What Does It Take to Keep a Classic Mainframe Alive? - amynordrum
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/tech-history/space-age/what-does-it-take-to-keep-a-classic-mainframe-alive
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hapless
The museum 1401 is insanely cool, but a mainframe it is not.

The 1401 was more of a service processor for a mainframe. You could use a 1401
to order jobs and manage card sorters and things of that nature.

The 1401 was occasionally sold as a standalone accounting machine instead of a
service processor, but never as a mainframe unto itself.

It's more of a minicomputer than a mainframe. Which should say everything
about its era. "Mini" meant only like, six racks of gear.

~~~
giardini
Fond memories!

I learned FORTRAN on an IBM 1401. Our intro chemistry professor thought it was
a good idea to incorporate IBM's FORTRAN programming coursework into our
chemistry lab. I wasn't so good at chemistry but excelled in programming and
so earned a decent chem grade. In the years that followed I used the FORTRAN
for numerical analysis classes. It all led to a career in programming.

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ilovecaching
I've seen the demonstration and I go there all the time. I LOVE computer
history, it's our legacy, we're standing on the shoulders of the real
pioneers. Those people who had to start from punch cards and mainframe
terminals... they're the ones who _really_ knew how to program.

What's crazy is it's so unknown to the general populace. Kids learn about
George Washington and Bill Gates the businessman who gave us Windows, but they
have no clue who Ken and Dennis are. Punch cards are meaningless to them. They
wouldn't know an old hard disk from a vinyl record box. But one day they will.
One day people will realize that this was the beginning of humanity. The real
beginning. The PDP-11, the 1400 series, the ENIAC.

If you haven't been to the computer history museum, go!

~~~
justinjlynn
> One day people will realize that this was the beginning of humanity.

It's important, but let's not engage in hyperbole.

~~~
WalterBright
He may be right. I don't think Gutenberg had any idea what he'd done, either.

------
emersonrsantos
You can run classic and modern mainframe operating systems and software with
hercules-390 emulator.

I suggest Jay Moseley’s excellent site on MVS system generation [1] or get
Jürgen Winkelmann and Volker Bandke MVS Turnkey installed system ready to go
[2].

[1]
[http://www.jaymoseley.com/hercules/installMVS/install.htm](http://www.jaymoseley.com/hercules/installMVS/install.htm)
[2] [http://wotho.ethz.ch/tk4-/](http://wotho.ethz.ch/tk4-/)

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arminiusreturns
The closest I ever got to a real mainframe was one time when I took over a
failing datacenter and brought it up to t2...

It had a Cray 2 just sitting there, gathering dust. I loved the look of it. I
think eventually they sold it just to make room.

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WalterBright
When I was at college in the 70's, there was a surplus electronics store
nearby. It was fun browsing it. They even had ferrite core memory modules. I
wish I'd bought a couple of those.

------
RickJWagner
That's awesome!

I started programming professionally back in 1990 on IBM mainframes. I used to
daydream about buying an old machine to run in the basement. (But shortly
after the 386 and 486 machines started hosting emulators that allowed
mainframe programming on the desktop. My burning desire for a home mainframe
died out.)

Good times....

~~~
zandl
They give out free remote shell accounts to a number of their mainframes
actually, or if you go in person they encourage you to write code on the
machines they have. It’s a “living” museum.

~~~
PostOnce
That's the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, this is the Computer History
Museum in Mountain View (used to be in Boston).

Unless I'm mistaken and they both let you do stuff on the computers, which
would be cool.

~~~
dano
The Living Computer Museum, funded by the late Paul Allen, does indeed keep
their computers running and offer accounts. You can request a login at the
following link

[https://livingcomputers.org/Request-a-
Login.aspx](https://livingcomputers.org/Request-a-Login.aspx)

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View California has a few old
computers running, but is mostly a display museum.

At the Living Computer Museum I logged into a DEC-2060 on a VT100 terminal and
amazed my younger friends by navigating around the system and firing up a few
ancient text based games. Being of the hacker mindset, I also showed them all
the information you could get about logged in users prior to logging in from
which one could have used to guess account credentials back in the day...

Explaining and demoing the COMND JSYS was quite fun. The COMND JSYS provided
command line parsing and completion, one of the predecessors to t-shell, bash,
and other shells with completion. I had a great time revising the past and
highly recommend you visit with an old-skool programmer.

For those who are curious you can read about the COMND JSYS on page 164
(chapter 3, pg 52) of the following document

ftp://bitsavers.informatik.uni-
stuttgart.de/pdf/dec/pdp10/TOPS20/AA-4166E-TM_TOPS-20_Monitor_Calls_Reference_Ver_5_Dec82.pdf

------
bdavis__
Until about 1990, if you owned a mainframe or a mini, anything that needed
chilled air and a raised floor, you knew the vendor field engineer. Because
the computer itself, the disk drives, or the tape drives broke and / or
required periodic maintenance. pdp 11 was an outlier, as it was highly
reliable (and slow as a turtle).

removeable disk packs were always a problem due to head crashes.

my point is, every computer had downtime due to poor reliability, when
evaluated against what we have today. and most things were not 'user
serviceable', unless your user was highly skilled in electronics, test
equipment and digital logic.

In my field, once we moved to SGI's you started to see the salesman a lot more
than the FE because the machines were so reliable. And today it is all
commodity parts that anyone can cheaply swap-tronix things back to
operational.

------
acomjean
my old work gave me a microvax in the late 1990s. I rolled it out of work
(security held the door open oddly didn't really check if I should be taking
this thing), where it was used for cad. I got it working at home but honestly
I didn't really have great software and buying anything additional was not
easy at the compusa.. it ended up on the electronics scrap.

I give the computer museum credit for keeping this history in working order.

~~~
hapless
The microvax was two levels removed from mainframe land.

The original VAX systems, occupying 2 to 4 cabinets, were similar to the 1401.
They were both "mini" computers -- smaller than a mainframe, but considerable
and interesting unto themselves.

The microvax was a VAX re-implemented with much cheaper, cooler logic, so it
could be sold as a desk-side or a single rack system.

------
mothsonasloth
I love computing history. For anyone in the UK, I recommend you visit the
national museum of computing in Milton Keynes.

It has so many things to look and interact with.

Most notably the Colossus, Bombe, Acorn computers and BBC micros.

If you are visiting as a tourist it's not too hard to get there from central
London by train or car.

~~~
lukeh
Thank you for this tip: I saw your comment this morning and went today (am
visiting London). Great stuff. Not as much vintage “modern” computing as the
Computer History Museum in Mountain View but lots of amazing things, and of
course lots about the Enigma and code breaking.

~~~
mothsonasloth
:D glad you liked it, I wish I could take commission for the amount of
referrals I have given for it.

I take it you noticed the "politics" of Bletchely Park trust and TNMOC. Its
sad that the two organisations fight over the heritage of that place.

------
eljimmy
Does anyone know the history of how they coined the term "Mainframe"?

~~~
grzm
> _" The term originally referred to the large cabinets called "main frames"
> that housed the central processing unit and main memory of early
> computers."_

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainframe_computer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainframe_computer)

~~~
reaperducer
Interestingly, the term “mainframe” seems to have become exclusive to big iron
only in the mid 1980’s.

If you read computer magazines from the 70’s, machines that we would call
desktops were very often referred to as mainframes.

~~~
drfuchs
I respectfully disagree. In the 70’s, IBM 360s / 370s and such were
“mainframes”, while PDP11s and the like were “mini computers”. As 8080 / Z80
machines started to appear, they were always “microcomputers”, eventually
evolving into “desktops”, with higher-end ones “workstations”.

But “mainframe” was exclusively used for big batch and time-sharing iron
sitting in a “machine room” that you weren’t allowed into unless you were
employed as an “operator” or the IBM serviceman doing scheduled weekly PM
(preventive maintenance), during which time no jobs ran.

~~~
qbrass
The term "mainframe" was also used for the part of microcomputer cases that
held the expansion cards, but they weren't referring to the computer itself.

It seems to come from microcomputer hardware and accessory companies trying to
throw the word "mainframe" into their ads somehow and make their stuff seem
more important.

~~~
reaperducer
While the term "mainframe" was common in advertisements, it was also used in
the article text of magazines.

For example:

"MERLIN (trademark of MiniTerm Associates) is a new concept in peripherals
modules for mainframe microcomputer systems." (Merlin was a dumb terminal for
IMSAI and Altair desktop comptuers) - Byte Magazine, November 1976, page 64

