On Vaxen! On Vixen! On Osborne and Zenith!

[jrittenhouse]

Originally published at . You can comment here or there.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2499b/if_it_aint_broke_dont_fix_it_ancient_computers_in_use_today.html

Garry Ward, an old pal, used to make a living at keeping antique mainframe-ish things going; I gasped that they’d *do* that and not get something newer and better, but…he was also the guy who

Comments

[beamjockey]

Livejournal says "Originally published at [period]"

I take it this is supposed to indicate another blog?

[jrittenhouse]

Yes, and I need to fix that in PHP. I originally write the stuff here 99% of the time at my personal site (http://journal.memnison.com, running on Wordpress (latest version) and it auto-posts to here. At one point I had a cross-post over to FB as well, but FB now gets its own stuff, and I sometime copy things from here to FB as well.

For all intents and purposes, *nobody* but me looks at the original journal, and I get all my comments over here. A section of the crossposter doodad's PHP sets up that notice, and I need to remove the stub of it left.

[crankyoldgoat]

oh, tons o' fun, mainframes aren't antiques.

Here's a link to current IBM Mainframe systems:

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

You can follow the links to the actual IBM documentation if you don't trust Wiki.

Here's the analogy:

when you need mulch for your yard, get your F-150 or Dodge Ram, when you've 5,000 tons of coal to move, you call the Norfolk Southern....

granted, where drawing pretty pictures is concerned, the PC has the edge, but for day to day business operations, the mainframe will eat a room full of PCs and have room left over to still get work done.

Oh, and don't forget the articles I transcribed for you for the APA....you help PAY for my PC.

[jrittenhouse]

Garry: **don't** use that descriptive phrase to me, please. /// Yeah, you're write about my fan writing stuff being done as well, and glad I could help. I **hate** typewriters. Hate, hate, hate.

[crankyoldgoat]

deal - you don't call mainframes "antiques", either.

[jrittenhouse]

*sigh* I was not saying all mainframes are antiques; I was talking about systems that were antiques when you started dealing with the companies. As I understood it, they had bought new replacement machines, but rather than develop a new datasystem on the new machines with better, more flexible OS/software sets and port the data over to that, you wrote some kind of emulator for, say, a 1955-era computer (the old one being retired) and the whole setup for the database, kit and kaboodle, was picked up and transfered over. A modern example might be to take a TRS-80 database program from 1982 and create an emulator on a Windows 8 system to have it run on a virtual machine within.

Do I have it right? No intent to equate mainframes as all being obsolescent, just trying to describe what your work was at the time.