Ask HN: What happened to the old mainframes? Were many preserved? - hoodoof
======
DrScump
I doubt it. Storage costs and hassles would be immense. Given that few people
kept old Apple 1's around, as small as they are (which is why they sell so
high at auction), I see no sense in preserving a mainframe, then or now.

I would guess that most surrendered mainframes (for the past decade or two)
would be directly decommissioned, having no subsequent market warranting re-
deployment.

Have you _been_ in an old-school mainframe shop? I left that world in 1986 for
the minis/PCs/UNIX world and didn't follow the industry after that. But at
that time, a mainframe like an IBM 309x (successor to the 308x, which was the
successor to the 3033, which was the successor to the 370 era) required huge,
elevated, Halon-protected, chilled rooms, with banks of tape drives the size
of a phone booth, hard drives the size of a small chest freezer, plus numerous
large peripherals (printers, card readers, card punches, etc.), and an
enormous power infrastructure.

Today, you now have more CPU power in your phone.

I _loved_ operating mainframes alone - it was like being an orchestra
conductor, except you could reboot a recalcitrant concertmaster.

It was typical of the mainframe world that machines were _leased_ rather than
owned. I guess the owners would redeploy if there was any customer, otherwise
decommission for parts/scrap. The hassle of transport/exchange was huge.

BTW, anybody need 9-track reel tapes? I have a few.

~~~
hoodoof
Yes I worked in a few places with mainframes. Never found them very
interesting though because they were so tightly controlled.

I do remember how flaky they were though. Constantly crashing and needing
reboot, which could easily take the better part of an hour.

~~~
DrScump

      Constantly crashing and needing reboot
    

Not at all, in my experience. They were _vulnerable_ to power dips but
otherwise low trouble (by the standards of the time; not like, say, SunOS on
Sparc). They would go weeks or months without a reboot (such had to be
scheduled through upper management and customers).

IBMs even had a cool _Quiesce_ feature where you could stop the processor (and
all I/O) while leaving the system stable. This was necessary when doing things
like disconneting/reconnecting peripherals and drives. But it didn't sing
"Daisy, Daisy" in the process.

------
pinewurst
For certain values of "mainframe", some are operational or being restored at
the Living Computer Museum in Seattle (a very neat place).

[http://www.livingcomputermuseum.org/The-
Collection/Exhibit-H...](http://www.livingcomputermuseum.org/The-
Collection/Exhibit-Hall.aspx#Mainframe)

