[PLUG] Why mainframes excel: was How the IRS is able to reverse engineer Assembly

[Steve Litt <slitt@troubleshooters.com>]

On Thu, 8 Feb 2018 20:34:32 -0800
Lowell Higley <higleylh@gmail.com> wrote:


> Whether you know it or not, you probably touch a MF dozens of time
> every day.. airlines.. banks.. financial markets.. insurance. All run
> by mainframes. You pay social security or get a social security
> check? Yup, you guessed it.. all run on mainframes.  Greater than 90%
> chance that when you use your mobile phone to check your bank account
> balance - you're touching a mainframe on the backend.
> 
> An insurance company that will remain nameless for the purpose of this
> message has been trying to leave the MF for almost a decade (a M$
> alum sits on their board). They've only been able to successfully
> port one application (starting from scratch) and it's always down and
> generally performs like @(#*.  Without MFs your interactions with
> many companies would be much worse than they are today (definitely
> not saying it's perfect today.)  Even as "expensive" and "antiquated"
> as they are (the mainframe will turn 55 in 2019), they arguably still
> out perform and - especially when you factor in all the indirect
> costs - cost less than other platforms.

I've heard this from enough mainframe-knowledgeable people that I
believe it, so the next question is, how does the mainframe bestow so
much power? It seems to me that it wouldn't be hard to put a few
terabytes of RAM on a board. With 64 bit addressing it would be no
problem to use it all. It would also be easy to put a bunch of
processors on the system. I've heard the mainframe's real advantage is
its bus, but I haven't heard the details.

So how do mainframes derive their power?

SteveT
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