I have learned something new today (good god ;-)). I have always thought that mainframes were dying dinosaurs on its way out off the market; sure you have supercomputers (but are that really the same thing?). What's cool is that IBM is still manufacturing mainframes (like the Z System) and the demand is increasing incredibly especially in banking and other areas with a high demand of reliability, security and accuracy.
What is even COOLER than the fact that these giant machines are still in production is how they operate. Unlike PCs, or supercomputers for that matter, they are not built to do extreme processing but instead getting the job done rather fast. They pretty much just move data around.
For example, when a transaction is started the job is sent through 2 pipelines and then compared. If the result does not match then the mainframe will try again and if it fails the second time as well the transaction will be moved to another processor, hence making it really reliable. The worst thing that can happen is not that the mainframe crashes but instead that everything will just go much slower.
The modern Z System from IBM can (and are) even operate on code from as far back as the 1960s. So .NET and Java have a lot of roadmiles to go before they can even be compared to Cobol. No matter how fast and versatile the modern systems may be the mainframes are still the back bone of our global economy.
posted @ Saturday, April 14, 2007 3:28 AM