this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
64 points (95.7% liked)

Technology

59979 readers
3659 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I’ve never worked with major enterprise or government systems where there’s aging mainframes — the type that get parodied for running COBOL. So, I’m completely ignorant, although fascinated. Are they power hogs? Are they wildly cheap to run? Are they even run as they were back in the day?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Modern hardware designed to run ancient software. Not all that special.

An older example that's popular still is the as400. IBM replaced these but a lot of businesses refuse to acknowledge that and maintain these beasts sometimes paying more for parts than MSRP.

Interesting article that's related.

https://www.gao.gov/blog/outdated-and-old-it-systems-slow-government-and-put-taxpayers-risk

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Part of that is the racket that is software licensing for mainframes. Many vendors like CA7 charge based on the machines computational capacity. You can introduce soft limits or send usage reports, but not all vendors accept that to lower your price. Super expensive software costs, at least back when I worked on zOS.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

If you ever talk with an insurance guy or system admin, you will understand why as/400 can't be replaced that easily and most of the time people were unhappy with generic stuff replacing it.

Once while the split of IBM was on table, Microsoft was only interested in AS400 line. They used to do a lot of critical things on them. Yes, even Microsoft.

One can emulate AS400 since the entire thing including hardware and OS is a virtual platform from the start. I am not into financial/insurance/travel so I didn't investigate if IBM offers a POWER or Xeon replacement. You won't be able to explain throwing away millions of lines working code to move to some current fashion framework/language. These people make their money from 1/1000s of cents.