This is so cool. Especially given that this thing can run Linux.
I had a sorta-kinda similar experience in college years ago. My college (a small community college in the middle of nowhere) had received an IBM AS/400 machine as a donation. I signed up for some "Survey of Operating Systems" class, and when I showed up the first day, the instructor (who already knew me) goes "Phil, your job is to take the AS/400, install an OS and get it on the Internet". Needless to say, at that point in time, I'd never seen or touched an AS/400 before.
Anyway, the instructor pointed me to a room with an AS/400, a huge stack of tapes (for the OS), a huge stack of manuals, and basically said "just do it." It was an interesting experience, but in the end, I got the thing on the 'net so you could telnet to it and work on it. And that indirectly led to the beginnings of my career in IT, as my first real IT job was as an AS/400 operator / Netware admin, and it was a job this instructor connected me with after this class.
So here's to taking vintage IBM equipment and dorking around with it and putting it on the Internet!
What's the most amused you've ever been by the collaborative development process (flame war, silly code submission, amazing accomplishment)?
I think my favorite part is when somebody does something utterly crazy using Linux. Things that just make no sense at all, but are impressive from a technical angle (and even more impressive from a "they spent many months doing that?" angle).
Like when Alan Cox was working on porting Linux to the 8086. Or the guy who built his own computer using an 8-bit microcontroller that he wired up to some RAM and an SD card, then wrote an ARM emulator for it, and booted Linux (really really slowly) on his board.
I used to start the backup jobs on a AS/400 during a Summer job for my technical course.
The most interesting thing was while researching about them almost a decade later, I came to discover their programming model with a common runtime and a kernel level JIT for software.
.NET on Windows/WP, Android and iOS/bitcode might be the closest thing we have on current systems about that programming model.
> Anyway, the instructor pointed me to a room with an AS/400, a huge stack of tapes (for the OS), a huge stack of manuals, and basically said "just do it."
Me and a friend went to a programming class ages ago that was teaching AS/400 and programming in RPG/400 on them. That was a funny language. I was working at the state for a bit too, doing smaller programs for the database of inhabitants. Some of the bigger industries had a few AS/400 too but never got a job there programming.
There's money to be made in the IBM midrange market. The company I work for is still using the iSeries (although we're switching to TOP_5_CLOUD_ERP system as we speak), and we use Apache and PHP to connect to modern systems.
Every year, IBM is at the user conference for the software we currently use. They're always showing off their newest Linux machine with 200 cores and I don't know why, because half the people there aren't even using bar coding, and everyone there is a small fry.
Here's where a niche developer comes in. You can use Java which is supported by IBM, Zend has a nice PHP setup, and IBM's bastardized version of Apache. Want to build an API to interact with this stone age fucker? You can do it. Build a Slack integration and look like a hero. Heck build some crappy web app because it's easier and faster to do development with your favorite framework than it is to do it on the IBM with RPG and whatever the fuck that thing runs. SQL your brains out!
These customers aren't leaving the IBM without investing a half a million dollars into a new platform. Every year, there are less and less people there, but they'll gladly spend $50k to integrate some simple workflow.
Rent a booth for $1,000, give away an iPad or some FitBits and pass out some business cards. Go to 3-4 of these a year and you should be able to keep busy for a while. And you already know SQL, PHP, Apache, you just get to discover the 'intricacies' of doing it on the IBM.
A company I used to work for built online shopping carts. We were building one for an industrial company who's inventory system ran on an AS/400, and we were doing an integration. I had ZERO familiarity with IBM mainframes at the time and presumed (wrongly) that it ran some flavor of UNIX. I was to work with their lead developer to get the integration going. He was maybe late 50s, I never met him face to face, only over the phone. I suggest that they build a "simple JSON or XML API" for us to connect to. This makes their lead very uncomfortable. He does NOT want to put the machine on the public facing Internet (reasonable enough) and has never worked with XML or JSON. He instead wants to set up a system where hourly it would email us CSV diffs. Maintaining data working from diffs sounded like a nightmare to me, plus I'd never programmaticly worked with receiving emails. Whole thing sounded iffy. Plus understanding their data model it would not be shoved into CSV without a fight. After a bunch of back and forth (weeks) we work out a system where the server would upload a combination of CSV and XML to an FTP share we controlled and I could reprocess the data hourly. It actually worked reasonably well. I'm curious if it's still in operation, I've long forgotten the name of the company we built this for, there were just so many.
That's some serious job right there, just dismantling the thing and putting it back together.
I hate it when I assembled computers and I ended up needing extra screws... or worse, I ended up with "spare" screws which left me wondering what exactly I missed. Can't imagine doing it to something this big.
Or like when you buy something that comes packed neatly..and as soon as you unpack it it becomes impossible to put it back and make it fit as before.
I can totally relate to this. While not a mainframe, I had to move and reassemble and put in working order a film telecine recently. It's a huge beast of a machine that consumes 5kW's and weighs a ton or more and comes with several computers and consoles. Fun part was there's no support for it. Company went dead a few years back. It was a ton of fun though, figuring all out from ye olde pdfs and hooking up a computer with putty to various RS-232 terminal outputs to see what's going on. I got it in proper and working condition in the end and it works amazingly well and is now in production: http://i.imgur.com/Euv3vrr.jpg
I even got to learn about HIPPI while at it. I wish I had more adventures like that.
Cool, years ago I spent many months going back & forth to Weiterstadt, working on Spirit DataCines and Spirit 2K/4K machines, adding support for controlling them via Baselight.
There's some considerable engineering in those machines. Though you could replace almost all the boards with one or two FPGAs these days
I occasionally see Spirit 2k's destined for the dump and wonder what would be entailed in running one. Since they were a little notorious for poor frame-to-frame registration I wonder if that will get worse as the mechanics age.
It's a strange time for telecines, with so many companies having disappeared but newer, much more compact designs appearing, for archival scanning presumably. If you haven't discovered it already the archives of the TiG mailing list are a great resource for TK stuff - e.g. this thread about the new Blackmagic/Digital Vision/MWA/Kinetta scanners... http://tig.colorist.org/pipermail/tig/2016-February/thread.h...
Seems like a very well grounded kid. He took his GED at 16 and started attending a community college using extra time he gained by going early to do career exploration. Very smart approach in my opinion.
I use old HP Proliant as a workstation. For $900 you get 24 cores and 256GB RAM. Its pretty loud and power inefficient, but works great for testing concurrent and memory intensive code.
The value seems to have depreciated even faster than for consumer hardware. I think you would expect to pay a bit more than $2 for a working laptop that sold for $2k in 2004.
I realize that the z series mainframes are better than those of old, but man, are Mom and Dad going to be pissed when they get their next power bill. A z890 is still going to need a 240VAC 30 amp power connection. Imagine running your dryer 24/7. :-)
Very entertaining talk! Awesome project. Almost brought a tear to my eye when he showed the picture of the entrance to the basement being excavated by his father...a kind of stoic supportive parenting to aspire to!
Does buying one of these on eBay get you the right to run zOS ? If so that could be a lower cost alternative for people interested in learning about mainframes, since if you had the usage rights you could run zOS on Hercules and just store the actual hardware.
From hercules-390 FAQ (which I was a developer long ago).
OS/390, z/OS, and other ESA or z/Architecture operating systems are definitely licensed to a particular machine. Therefore, in practice you cannot run any classic ESA or z/Architecture operating system on your PC unless you can obtain a license from IBM allowing you to do so. It is believed that there are, however, four ways you could run z/OS, z/VM, z/VSE, OS/390, VM/ESA, or VSE/ESA under Hercules using currently available licenses:
1. Running under Linux on the Pentium processor of a P/390 which is licensed to run the OS.
2. Running under Linux/390 on a mainframe which is licensed to run the OS.
3. Running under the terms of a disaster recovery provision of the OS license (but I really don't recommend depending on Hercules to be your disaster recovery solution!).
4. Using the IBM OS/390 or z/OS DemoPkg, which is available only to IBM employees and IBM Business Partners
Another thing I wonder about, is how hard it would be to crack these things in order to run at full speed/cores. Assuming you're not a business dodging IBM licensing fees, I can't imagine the chances of getting caught are very big -- and in either case it's an interesting intellectual problem (ignoring for a moment the legality of breaking licence agreements).
You can run the OS but you can't run anything that a business would use on it (at least not without winning the lottery). Any software package you'll find in the real world is going to be $100k
I own a number of old(er) systems programming manuals, JCL books, and even a couple of COBOL handbooks from a few years ago when I was playing around with hercules [1]. I had a ton of fun (from a hacker perspective). I recommend playing around with it, if only to get a look at how different things can be.
I've never heard of a computer running on three phase power before. That was unique.
My aged professors in college would joke about their interactions with mainframes. Some stories included making them vibrate at the right frequency such that they could move around. Apparently as a grad student one got in trouble for making them bump into each other. Kinda like having two Nokia phones vibrate in a "battle" against each other.
Great speaker, but he needs to learn not to do the powerpoint karaoke. The audience sees the slides, we see the slides, no reason to read them verbatim.
Less than you think. Recent x64 is a great deal faster than recent System Z if you compare just a single core. I think the total bandwidth is still better, but I don't know with how much if you compare high end systems.
I would guess you can give a z890 a good match with a raspberry pi 3... Unless it's IO bound...
A quick google says: 2451 mips on a 4-core raspberry pi 3 against 9000 mips on a 32-core z990... hmmm.
I have a couple of IBM X366 servers. They are quad-Xeon with 8GB of RAM each. They require two power supplies to be plugged in or otherwise will keep fans turned on full power constantly.
They are inefficient for daily use, but great for lab work. I spin them up, run whatever distributed task I need on 8 cores with 15K SAS drives, usually distributed Sony Vegas renderer, and shut them down. They also make a great lab for virtual machine work, so that does mean bringing the cloud in-house. :)
Owning my personal mainframe is a long-held dream of mine, but practically, it wouldn't make a lot of sense unless somebody would let me put it into their datacenter.
My apartment is on the second floor, so a) I would not be able to get it upstairs and b) the floor would probably collapse under the weight. Plus, it is pretty big and would make my living room kind of ... crowded. And then, there is the electricity... And even if I somehow could solve all these problems, I would still need to attach a storage server to it, which kind of has the same problems.
So I envy this person, a lot, but realistically, I would not want to buy one for myself.
(IIRC, during the S/390 days, IBM built a 4U mini-mainframe one could rack-mount. There also was the P/390, which was a single-board implementation that came with one CPU, a channel controller and 128 or 256 MB RAM, all on a PCI card - I think it was meant for developers. Sadly, IBM has given up on small-ish mainframes...)
The P/390 is very nifty (and there were Microchannel versions as well as PCI), as is the earlier XT/370 & AT/370 (ISA-bus implemented in re-microcoded mc68000s).
Still up, and it does prompt for a password. But he said the Chinese had been trying to get in for 2 weeks and failed, so it's probably not something obvious.
[+] [-] mindcrime|10 years ago|reply
I had a sorta-kinda similar experience in college years ago. My college (a small community college in the middle of nowhere) had received an IBM AS/400 machine as a donation. I signed up for some "Survey of Operating Systems" class, and when I showed up the first day, the instructor (who already knew me) goes "Phil, your job is to take the AS/400, install an OS and get it on the Internet". Needless to say, at that point in time, I'd never seen or touched an AS/400 before.
Anyway, the instructor pointed me to a room with an AS/400, a huge stack of tapes (for the OS), a huge stack of manuals, and basically said "just do it." It was an interesting experience, but in the end, I got the thing on the 'net so you could telnet to it and work on it. And that indirectly led to the beginnings of my career in IT, as my first real IT job was as an AS/400 operator / Netware admin, and it was a job this instructor connected me with after this class.
So here's to taking vintage IBM equipment and dorking around with it and putting it on the Internet!
[+] [-] larrik|10 years ago|reply
When everything goes perfect, they are still a complete nightmare. I can't imagine how you pulled it off, frankly.
[+] [-] akerro|10 years ago|reply
Interview with Linus:
What's the most amused you've ever been by the collaborative development process (flame war, silly code submission, amazing accomplishment)?
I think my favorite part is when somebody does something utterly crazy using Linux. Things that just make no sense at all, but are impressive from a technical angle (and even more impressive from a "they spent many months doing that?" angle).
Like when Alan Cox was working on porting Linux to the 8086. Or the guy who built his own computer using an 8-bit microcontroller that he wired up to some RAM and an SD card, then wrote an ARM emulator for it, and booted Linux (really really slowly) on his board.
https://www.linux.com/news/special-feature/linux-developers/...
[+] [-] pjmlp|10 years ago|reply
The most interesting thing was while researching about them almost a decade later, I came to discover their programming model with a common runtime and a kernel level JIT for software.
.NET on Windows/WP, Android and iOS/bitcode might be the closest thing we have on current systems about that programming model.
[+] [-] bitwize|10 years ago|reply
"You're gonna learn to swim the Stennis way."
[+] [-] Moru|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eps|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bluedino|10 years ago|reply
Every year, IBM is at the user conference for the software we currently use. They're always showing off their newest Linux machine with 200 cores and I don't know why, because half the people there aren't even using bar coding, and everyone there is a small fry.
Here's where a niche developer comes in. You can use Java which is supported by IBM, Zend has a nice PHP setup, and IBM's bastardized version of Apache. Want to build an API to interact with this stone age fucker? You can do it. Build a Slack integration and look like a hero. Heck build some crappy web app because it's easier and faster to do development with your favorite framework than it is to do it on the IBM with RPG and whatever the fuck that thing runs. SQL your brains out!
These customers aren't leaving the IBM without investing a half a million dollars into a new platform. Every year, there are less and less people there, but they'll gladly spend $50k to integrate some simple workflow.
Rent a booth for $1,000, give away an iPad or some FitBits and pass out some business cards. Go to 3-4 of these a year and you should be able to keep busy for a while. And you already know SQL, PHP, Apache, you just get to discover the 'intricacies' of doing it on the IBM.
[+] [-] donatj|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bencollier49|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsmithatx|10 years ago|reply
https://www.reddit.com/r/IBM/comments/3relk4/i_just_bought_a...
[+] [-] saganus|10 years ago|reply
I hate it when I assembled computers and I ended up needing extra screws... or worse, I ended up with "spare" screws which left me wondering what exactly I missed. Can't imagine doing it to something this big.
Or like when you buy something that comes packed neatly..and as soon as you unpack it it becomes impossible to put it back and make it fit as before.
Maybe I'm the problem... uhmmm..
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Keyframe|10 years ago|reply
I even got to learn about HIPPI while at it. I wish I had more adventures like that.
[+] [-] jamesfmilne|10 years ago|reply
There's some considerable engineering in those machines. Though you could replace almost all the boards with one or two FPGAs these days
What are you using it with? BONES?
[+] [-] lcrs|10 years ago|reply
It's a strange time for telecines, with so many companies having disappeared but newer, much more compact designs appearing, for archival scanning presumably. If you haven't discovered it already the archives of the TiG mailing list are a great resource for TK stuff - e.g. this thread about the new Blackmagic/Digital Vision/MWA/Kinetta scanners... http://tig.colorist.org/pipermail/tig/2016-February/thread.h...
[+] [-] js8|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DigitalJack|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nix0n|10 years ago|reply
This is important when working with ESD-sensitive electronics.
[+] [-] jkot|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lossolo|10 years ago|reply
And he got it for 237$, good deal :)
[+] [-] vixate|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tgflynn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikestew|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeifCarrotson|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DigitalJack|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] randlet|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tgflynn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emersonrsantos|10 years ago|reply
OS/390, z/OS, and other ESA or z/Architecture operating systems are definitely licensed to a particular machine. Therefore, in practice you cannot run any classic ESA or z/Architecture operating system on your PC unless you can obtain a license from IBM allowing you to do so. It is believed that there are, however, four ways you could run z/OS, z/VM, z/VSE, OS/390, VM/ESA, or VSE/ESA under Hercules using currently available licenses:
1. Running under Linux on the Pentium processor of a P/390 which is licensed to run the OS.
2. Running under Linux/390 on a mainframe which is licensed to run the OS.
3. Running under the terms of a disaster recovery provision of the OS license (but I really don't recommend depending on Hercules to be your disaster recovery solution!).
4. Using the IBM OS/390 or z/OS DemoPkg, which is available only to IBM employees and IBM Business Partners
[+] [-] e12e|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedino|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yuhong|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wiseleo|10 years ago|reply
Pro tip: when someone offers money for using something about which you don't care, say "Sure, how much do you think you need to get started?"
[+] [-] hvs|10 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.hercules-390.eu/
http://www.bsp-gmbh.com/turnkey/
[+] [-] cordite|10 years ago|reply
My aged professors in college would joke about their interactions with mainframes. Some stories included making them vibrate at the right frequency such that they could move around. Apparently as a grad student one got in trouble for making them bump into each other. Kinda like having two Nokia phones vibrate in a "battle" against each other.
[+] [-] timc3|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrcsparker|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] viraptor|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jerry2|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kpil|10 years ago|reply
I would guess you can give a z890 a good match with a raspberry pi 3... Unless it's IO bound...
A quick google says: 2451 mips on a 4-core raspberry pi 3 against 9000 mips on a 32-core z990... hmmm.
[+] [-] amelius|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wiseleo|10 years ago|reply
They are inefficient for daily use, but great for lab work. I spin them up, run whatever distributed task I need on 8 cores with 15K SAS drives, usually distributed Sony Vegas renderer, and shut them down. They also make a great lab for virtual machine work, so that does mean bringing the cloud in-house. :)
The X366 is a serious piece of hardware that later got renamed to 3850. Their current incarnation is http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/systems/servers/mission-critica...
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krylon|10 years ago|reply
My apartment is on the second floor, so a) I would not be able to get it upstairs and b) the floor would probably collapse under the weight. Plus, it is pretty big and would make my living room kind of ... crowded. And then, there is the electricity... And even if I somehow could solve all these problems, I would still need to attach a storage server to it, which kind of has the same problems.
So I envy this person, a lot, but realistically, I would not want to buy one for myself.
(IIRC, during the S/390 days, IBM built a 4U mini-mainframe one could rack-mount. There also was the P/390, which was a single-board implementation that came with one CPU, a channel controller and 128 or 256 MB RAM, all on a PCI card - I think it was meant for developers. Sadly, IBM has given up on small-ish mainframes...)
[+] [-] kabdib|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kjs3|10 years ago|reply
More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-based_IBM-compatible_mainfr...
These days there's always the Hercules emulator to get your IBM fix.
http://www.hercules-390.eu/
Me? I'm looking for a Micro A, the desktop version of the Burroughs B5000 mainframe.
[+] [-] nodesocket|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc808|10 years ago|reply
Still up, and it does prompt for a password. But he said the Chinese had been trying to get in for 2 weeks and failed, so it's probably not something obvious.