by Dwayne Phillips<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Big iron is back. The mainframe is back. And we hate it more now than ever.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… well it was 1979, Baton Rouge, Louisiana and a friend of my father worked for the computer company of America (IBM). He walked me through the BIG ROOM holding the mainframe computer of the state’s university system. It was a variant of the model 360 computer held in a room that had more square feet than my house. It had 16 MegaBytes of memory. People gasped when we said that number. It was all liquid cooled. How do you cool a computer with cold water?<\/p>\n\n\n\n That was the mainframe computer. That was the computer center. We used the cycles in that mainframe on our class assignments. We didn’t know it, but we were told it was so. The computer center was the dwelling place that few of us ever trod. It was like that place in Petra that Indiana Jones and Sean Connery entered in that movie. It was amazing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then some group in Massachusetts (yes the spelling checker got that one right for me) created these PDP-## and VAX-## mini-computers and later some guys in California built a computer using a microprocessor that you put on your kitchen table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then we fast forward a few decades and now we have the datacenter or data center (I have yet to resolve that question). Ah! that sacred ground in which few trod, but we are all using the computers inside or at least people tell us we are using the computers inside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Big iron is back. It is the datacenter. And it is hated by those who hate buildings that occupy acres of land that used to be farms. Funny how those who hate the buildings never worked on a farm yet criticize the grandchildren of the farmers for selling out to big iron and all that stuff. I digress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The other funny thing is that computers are much smaller and much more powerful than the mainframe of 1979, but we need a bigger building to house them. What happened with all that? I digress again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today’s datacenter is the mainframe computer and the computer center of days gone by. We sort of laughed at the mainframe when we saw a computer with an apple sticker on it. Then the logo of the computer company of America appeared on a computer that I could put on the kitchen table. We laughed a bit more. The mainframe went away for a while. The computer center changed its name to data center. What happened to the computer? What is this data stuff?<\/p>\n\n\n\n We awed at the computer center and the mainframe. Then we chuckled at them. Now we disdain the datacenter. Well, at least those of use who weren’t paid all that money for all that land, and concrete, and steel, and copper, and fiber optics, and … the list continues. Since I didn’t get any of that money, I guess I am one of the disdain-ers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Time moves on. We circle back. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Dwayne Phillips Big iron is back. The mainframe is back. And we hate it more now than ever. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… well it was 1979, Baton Rouge, Louisiana and a friend of my father worked for the computer company of America (IBM). He walked me through the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,454,83,374,520,367],"tags":[143,455,200,372,521,366],"class_list":["post-4580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-change","category-cloud-computing","category-computing","category-data-science","category-datacenter","category-history","tag-change","tag-cloud-computing","tag-computing","tag-data-science","tag-datacenter","tag-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4580"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4581,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4580\/revisions\/4581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}