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It's funny. Laugh. IBM IT

Burying a Mainframe In Style 197

Posted by kdawson from the 10-bit-words dept.
coondoggie writes "Some users have gone to great lengths to dispose of their mainframes but few have gone this far. On November 21, 2007, the University of Manitoba said goodbye to its beloved mainframe computer by holding a New Orleans-style jazz funeral for its 47-year-old IBM 650, Betelgeuse. In case you were wondering what an IBM 650's specifications were, according to this Columbia University site, the 650's CPU was 5ft by 3ft by 6ft and weighed 1,966 lbs, and rented for $3200 per month. The power unit was 5x3x6 and weighed 2,972 pounds. The card reader/punch weighed 1,295 pounds and rented for $550/month. The memory was a rotating magnetic drum with 2000-word capacity (10 digits and sign) and random access time of 2.496 ms. For an additional $1,500/month you could add magnetic core memory of 60 words with access time of .096ms. Big Blue sold some 2,000 of the mainframes, making it one of the first successfully mass-produced computers."
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Burying a Mainframe In Style More

Burying a Mainframe In Style

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  • Why recycle it? (Score:5, Funny)

    by odsock ( 863358 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @05:35AM (#21749766)
    It deserved a burial at C!

  • and in its place... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @05:44AM (#21749800)
    > It leaves behind some 25 servers that are now needed
    > to run these systems

    25 servers that will have to be taken offline for patches,
    hardware upgrades, error analysis, disk failures, subnet
    changes...

    25 servers that will require a dozen admin staff and ongoing
    per-instance support contracts with hardware and software
    vendors.

    25 servers pulling a magnitude more power, requiring heavy-
    duty cooling and a bank of UPS.

    25 servers that will be decommissioned in three years at
    ``end of life''.

    This is progress.

    • Re:and in its place... (Score:5, Informative)

      by petes_PoV ( 912422 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @07:26AM (#21750194)
      The box they actually "buried" (note, this is a journalistic misrepresentation - it was scrapped, not buried. The metals make it far too valuable to merely throw away) was a 60MIPS bottom of the range Amdahl. At current rates of conversion, that corresponds to about 4 or 5 modern PCs.

      Typically a datacentre will have 1 admin person on shift for every 800-1200 PC type servers, as opposed to the specialised staff that a mainframe needs.

      The servers need the same quality of power, cooling, maintenance, security and monitoring that a mainframe does, so there's very little difference - except you can place the servers in a single rack, using a fraction of the floorspace.

      Also, mainframes too are usually replaced on a 3 - 5 year cycle in most places simply for economic reasons. New tech is faster, cheaper, more reliable and supportable. The story gives the impression that the university got rid of a 47 year old mainframe - they didn't. The box they "buried" was less than 10 years old and the nonsense about card readers and monthly rental costs is completely irrelevant to the removal of the Amdahl - it would never have any of these attributes.


      • One way new computers can be cheaper is a reduced number of CPUs for the same or better processing power. If you use software that is charged by the CPU, upgrading your hardware is an easy way to save money.
    • When did nostalgia take over and people's brain stop working on a logical level? I blame "That 70s Show."

      25 servers that will have to be taken offline for patches,
      hardware upgrades, error analysis, disk failures, subnet
      changes...

      And look, they're all redundant with storage on a high-availabiity SAN. Sure you have to take a machine offline maybe once every couple of months, but who notices?

      25 servers that will require a dozen admin staff and ongoing
      per-instance support contracts with hardware and software
      ven

  • Sad news. (Score:2, Funny)

    by Funkcikle ( 630170 )
    Shame they'll still be paying IBM for it for the next three years.

  • Kudos (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Martian_Kyo ( 1161137 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @05:49AM (#21749818)
    to the guy(or girls and guys) who did this. Any machine that has been in service or at least functional for 47 years, deserves this kind of respect and this kind of send off.

    Yes, i know it's only a machine, and it has no feelings. But this is a respectful send off, and 'job well done, thank you' to all people who were involved in designing, maintaining and producing this mainframe.

    Plus...it's a very cool..and sounds like fun.

    • Re:Kudos (Score:5, Informative)

      by supersnail ( 106701 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @05:56AM (#21749844)
      As far as I can work out from the article what survived for 47 years was the server name and the applications.

      " in its final incarnation as an Amdahl Millienium 1050.."

      There is a lot of mention of IMS which wasnt available till the 1970s so all in all
      this is a pretty standard history for any mainframe site. (apart from actually replacing the
      mainframe which hardly ever happens).

      • Re:Kudos (Score:4, Informative)

        by Martian_Kyo ( 1161137 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @06:04AM (#21749870)
        Yeh, you are quite right.
        I dug around the article and links in it a little more, came to the server timeline/history

        1960 IBM 650 / IBM 1401 (Punched cards)
        1965 IBM 360/50 / IBM 1401 (funded by NRC)
        1970 IBM 360/65 / IBM 360/40 (first IMS applications)
        1975 IBM 370/168
        1980 Amdahl V7
        1985 Amdahl 580 and V7
        1990 IBM 3090-600
        1995 Amdahl 5890-300
        2000 Amdahl Millennium 415
        2005 Amdahl Millennium 1015

        Still a nice gesture, once again, mostly cause of the people who worked with it, than the machine itself.

        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by natoochtoniket ( 763630 )
          How many times have we seen something like this? ... The Amdahl Millennium runs a 5890 emulator. The 5890 machine runs a 3090 emulator. The 3090 runs an Amdahl V7 emulator, which simulates an IBM system-390. That 390 runs a system-360 emulation kernel. The 360 runs a 1401 emulator. And, the 1401 runs the 650 emulator. The original grade-report and transcript program, which was written in 650 machine code, was running on that 650 emulator because the only copy of the source deck was destroyed by mice i

        • I think there's a lot of misleading information in the original article, so I'm glad you dug up the truth. To expand on what you discovered, in 2000 (7 years ago this month) IBM began shipping its 64-bit z900 model. At virtually the same time you could boot the operating system into 64-bit mode, and you got a substantial subcapacity software discount as soon as you did that. The same year, the University of Manitoba bought the now-obsolete 31-bit [sic] Amdahl 415, probably with full knowledge that the 64-bi

    • MUH! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by wikinerd ( 809585 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @06:51AM (#21750058) Journal

      it's only a machine, and it has no feelings

      But how do you know this?

      And do you think that you are not a machine and that you have feelings? And if so how do you know this?

      How can you be so sure that the mathematical entities inside your beige box computer are not self-aware? How can you know that they don't scream when you shut the computer off and are not reborn when you grant them electrical current the next morning?

      Do you really know that you are anything different than a little sim in a simulated [wikipedia.org] world, or a self-aware mathematical entity [arxiv.org] in a mathematical universe [wikipedia.org]?

      You don't really know this for absolutely sure, do you? Then how can you claim so easily that something is only a machine and has no feelings when you don't even known whether you are a machine, and whether what you call your feelings are nothing more than simulated or mathematical constructs that you perceive as feelings?

      • Re:MUH! (Score:4, Funny)

        by MyLongNickName ( 822545 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @07:21AM (#21750168) Journal
        Been skipping your medication again? :)

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Martian_Kyo ( 1161137 )

        I don't know anything for sure, nobody does. However it IS very impractical and redundant to start every sentence with 'As far as I know' or with 'I might be wrong here'.

        That's understood, everything I type and know is relative to the information I have and the way I perceive it. For all we know you could be a figment of my imagination, or I could be the figment of yours, or we could be a figments of someone else's. While metaphysics are fun and seemingly profound and deep, they are ultimately pointless

      • But how do you know this?
        Ockham's Razor.

         

        • Ockham's Razor.

          One could very well use a fork [wikipedia.org], however. Do we really know anything for sure? We may choose to ignore some things or develop sets of rules to explain the reality, but is there anyone on this planet or anywhere that has even the slightest idea what the reality is?

          • We may choose to ignore some things or develop sets of rules to explain the reality, but is there anyone on this planet or anywhere that has even the slightest idea what the reality is?
            Reality is what you experience. There's no point trying to make it any more complicated than that.

             

            • Reality is what you experience.

              This implies that the ERH (External Reality Hypothesis) is wrong (and it follows logically that the MUH, Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, may also be wrong). But then we don't live in the same reality as dolphins, whales, ants, pigeons, cats, snails, trees, grass, or viruses (if these tiny things are what we call life - in fact they look more like genetic material without a host, and curiously their sole purpose seems to be to find a host, which probably implies that genetic material in general in all o

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Fred_A ( 10934 )

        it's only a machine, and it has no feelings

        But how do you know this?

        Electronic (and mechanical) machines have no feelings, only chemical machines have feelings. Just ask your VCR.

  • Reduce, reuse, refuse? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by pla ( 258480 )
    the 650's CPU was 5ft by 3ft by 6ft and weighed 1,966 lbs, and rented for $3200 per month. The power unit was 5x3x6 and weighed 2,972 pounds.

    ...And if they had recycled the copper and aluminum in just one of each rather than burying them, they could have bought an entire lab of mid-range PCs with it.

    But hey, that wouldn't get kitchy national media attention.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Guano_Jim ( 157555 )
      From TFE (The F*cking Eulogy), right below the text you quoted:

      But now we must lay you under the flora, because we have to go deal with this bloody Aurora. So we commit your parts to be recycled.

      Perhaps its parts were indeed recycled. So they got the money and kitchy media attention.

  • In my twenties a bunch of friends (about 10 of us) had a Death of the 486 Party.

    This was when Intel decided to focus on the Pentium chips.

    We couldn't afford to sacrifice a 486 at the time, they were still too expensive but we did hold a sacrifice of a 286.

    We had a ceremony, bon fire and tossed the hardware in the fire.

    Flamed by alcohol and good times, it was an absolute riot!

  • Oh (Score:4, Funny)

    by Sterling Christensen ( 694675 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @06:07AM (#21749892)
    And here I was picturing the way they decommissioned that printer in Office Space after reading the article title.

  • Just wondering.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by edwardpickman ( 965122 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @06:19AM (#21749930)
    Was the handcrank extra or did they come standard?
  • No, they LEASED THEM.

    How can you abstract an article - denominating the lease rates and conclude that, "Big Blue sold some 2,000 of the mainframes.."?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by simong ( 32944 )
      Not always true. Many companies bought theirs outright, but had them hosted and maintained by IBM on an IBM site. It's still the case today - I worked for a company who bought a zSeries outright, their third, but it lived in IBM's mainframe hall in Warwick. In the end it's whatever suits the balance sheet better.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by grolaw ( 670747 )
        This machine? From the '60's? I bet that the lease ended within the past 10 years.

        In the end, it is whatever fit IBM's balance sheet - albeit that distributed computing has made the monopoly far less powerful.

        I cut my teeth on a DEC PDP 11 (at a private high school!) - worked on a 370 series with MUSIC/SP in college and miss neither.....

        I well know that the University paid IBM big bucks - I had core time limits - as did every other kid.

    • Often for tax purposes, a company specs and buys a computer then immediately sells it back to the leasing firm, which might just be an arm of the same company that sold the machine in the first place.

      Where I work, we have some machines on lease, but the contract stipulates a right to buy the harddrives if we ever give the machines back. Often machines that go off lease are never collected by the leasing company, they are so old they just go to the salvage company.
  • Unfortunately I have witnessed cases where historic mainframes were dumped in empty land with no special consideration. It is a direct insult to the engineers who built these wonderful machines to dump them like normal trash without some sign of respect. Old computing parts should be sent to museums, not dumped like trash.
    • Personally I doubt if the engineers who built these wonderful machines give a rat's .... about where they end up. After they've been paid it's on to the next and bigger and better project. Life's too short to shed a tear every time an obsolete, inefficient and crushingly expensive (we saved over $500k per year on power bills by replacing an ECL mainframe with a CMOS one) box gets scrapped.

      These days with the price of metals, no-one in their right mind would dump one of these in landfill, they get shipped

    • No, Dr. Jones....You do!

  • a bit of accurate reporting would be nice (Score:5, Insightful)

    by petes_PoV ( 912422 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @06:34AM (#21749990)
    OK, this box might have started life in 1960 as an IBM, but it hasn't been one of those for many, many years. Like all good product lines IBM and Ahdahl have provided upgrade paths, so it stopped being it's original configuration before most slashdotters were born. I doubt that it has any of it's original parts left - not even the power plug.

    In fact a Millenium 1015 is quite a recent mainframe - introduced in 2000, (hence the name) although the 1015 is the bottom of the range unit with just a single processor.

    It would be nice if reporters actually researched this story instead of merely cat'n'pasting the whimsical and completely inaccurate press release.

  • #9, Cray-1 in Stockholm (Score:5, Interesting)

    by G3ckoG33k ( 647276 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @06:35AM (#21749994)
    The Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology [tekniskamuseet.se] put the first Cray 1 sold in Sweden on display yesterday (18 Dec 2007). It has the serial number 9!

    While not as old as the IBM machine, Cray always had a special aura of super-duper-power-ueber-performance to me. -

  • And in it's place (Score:3, Informative)

    by Colin Smith ( 2679 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @06:44AM (#21750034)
    You put a rack of 25 servers, running virtualisation software with an FC array of disk storage.

    Welcome to the modern mainframe.
     
    • It's cheaper and less capable but I guess because it has several processors and a somewhat autonomous disk array...that's a 'mainframe'?

      Not in my world.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by hey! ( 33014 )
      Mainframes are not primarily about calculation bandwidth (that's a supercomputer); they're about I/O bandwidth. If you watch the processor usage on your personal computer when it is slowed to a crawl, you'll see that most of the time the CPU utilization is not particularly high. That means the CPU is starved for I/O. That's why the lowest range IBM mainframe CPU, although not much more powerful than an Intel Core 2 Extreme, handles dozens of times the load except on compute bound tasks like cryptography

  • Metric System (Score:5, Funny)

    by filbranden ( 1168407 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @07:41AM (#21750268)

    Manitoba is in Canada. As in the rest of the civilized world, we use the metric system over here.

    the 650's CPU was 1.52m by 91cm by 1.83m and weighed 892kg, and rented for $3200 per month. The power unit was 1.52x0.91x1.83m and weighed 1348kg. The card reader/punch weighed 587kg and rented for $550/month.

    Sorry about the rant, but I'm fed up about these brain dead measurement units used by only a minority of only three unimportant countries [wikipedia.org] around the world. Time to wake up.

    The prices should be in Canadian Dollars as well, then it's a little cheaper than what TFA says. :-)

    • Sorry about the rant, but I'm fed up about these brain dead measurement units used by only a minority of only three unimportant countries around the world. Time to wake up.

      Er... Last time I was in England, Wales, and Scotland all three were using miles and miles per hour on all of their road signs. That doesn't sound "metric" to me. :-)

      The site you link to is wishful thinking, not reality.

  • Days gone by (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dlc3007 ( 570880 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @07:48AM (#21750292)
    This is one of the few times I miss being in college. I can't imagine the multi-national I now work for having enough of a sense of humor to retire a system like this.

  • Aah - mainframes (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Linker3000 ( 626634 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @08:00AM (#21750362) Journal
    I can remember sitting in on an IT meeting at a place where I was contracting (doing Netware Support) where one guy had to report back on his efforts to sell an old IBM Mainframe System that spanned the entire length of the computer room. The system had been replaced by this tiny, shiny, black AS400 that sat in the corner.

    "Best so far is about £2000" said the man.

    "You can only get £2000 for all that equipment!?" said the astonished IT Director.

    "No", came the reply, "That's the cheapest to pay someone to strip it out and take it away!"

  • The University of Manitoba is my alma mater and I have three separate thoughts about this: 1) This is the thing Telnet worked on?!? Oh dear lord! No wonder registering was hell! 2) This reeks of the engineers. Some how, some way. unbolting and turning all the seats backwards in an arts ampitheatre? Classic. 3) 25 desktops vs the mainframe. So they're going to add a couple more classrooms onto 5th floor?
    • I'm currently attending the U of M, and I got a tour of the mainframe room in April 2007. I'm afraid I don't know if it was responsible for telnet or not, but the new mainframe has nice blinkenlights on it :)

  • Completely wrong: the story she is (Score:4, Informative)

    by Ancient_Hacker ( 751168 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @08:56AM (#21750790)
    Somebody goofed. There is no way that they've been using an IBM 650 anytime in the last three decades. A 650 requires a full-time "customer engineer" to minister to its hundreds of type 5965 vacuum tubes and 2D21 thyratrons. I don't know the exact date, but I suspect IBM dropped support for the 650 sometime around 1966. Without IBM support for parts and service the 650 was unlikely to run for more than a week.

    As for applications, there's no way they ran anything mentioned in the article on the 650. All those apps require megabytes of memory and mass storage, the 650 had less than a thousandth of that.

    There's only the most tenuous of connections between whatever was retired and the 650.

    • You're totally right. Their timeline indicates the upgraded every 5 years. Good customers. Except they defected to Amdahl. That traitor.
  • I live in New Orleans, I have been to many "New Orleans-style Funerals", we call them second lines. This was not a New Orleans-style funeral. Just because you play jazz at it does not make it a New Orleans-style funeral. It involves parading the carcass overhead while parading through the streets with umbrellas, dancing, music, food, and good times. It sounds like it was a tongue-in-cheek send off nonetheless.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by grnbrg ( 140964 )
      It involves parading the carcass overhead while parading through the streets with umbrellas, dancing, music, food, and good times.

      I was at the funeral, and it had all of those things, umbrellas included.


      The event was (as it was intended to be) tongue-in-cheek, and was a great way to celebrate what was unquestionably the end (for good or bad) of a computing era here at the UofM.


      grnbrg.

  • personal hw burial anecdote (Score:5, Funny)

    by psbrogna ( 611644 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @10:58AM (#21752022)
    In the mid 90's I picked up an old Vax 725 at auction for pocket change because it was filled to the gills with serial ports and was a cheap way to get a bunch of modem's on a T-1 (at the time we were experimenting with a local ISP business). When I moved out of the house, I left the Vax in the basement 'cause it was so heavy and no longer of any use to me. The house was torn down as soon as I moved out. Over the time I lived in the house I had annual lobster bakes; stoned filled pit in the ground, etc. Each year the pit was dug somewhere else in my yard, used and then covered over after the consumed lobster carcasses were tossed in. I can't help but wonder what some archeologist, 10,000 years from now, will think should they uncover the mass burial of probably close to 1,000 lobsters (20 yrs, ~50 /yr) on a 1/4 acre plot, 100 miles inland from the ocean, all arranged around a mishmash of old hardware, including the Vax. If I did not know the details I would find it very puzzling. Did the lobster operate a small NOC? Was it some sort of pilgrimage for them? Was ritual crustacean sacrifice common in the early stages of the internet?
  • Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse!

  • Hey! Show a little sensitivity, Slashdot. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Betelgeuse ( 35904 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @11:51AM (#21752790) Homepage
    How would you feel about your weight being published online?

    • How would you feel about your weight being published online?

      I'm guessing that's what the average Slashdotter thought a 404 was.

  • Filings to filings... rust to rust.

  • Ceremonial Value and Valuing Ceremonies (Score:3, Insightful)

    by NetSettler ( 460623 ) <kent-slashdot@nhplace.com> on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @12:40PM (#21753502) Homepage Journal

    My first thought was that if we personalized computers more, perhaps we wouldn't waste as many of them. We have become very much a disposable society, in which the strangest part of this is that anyone bats an eye about the loss of a computer. Yet I remember when we used to mourn the passing of many of them. A lot of our waste problem in the world is caused by our willingness to assume that disposing of something does not require ceremony and can be done as casually as exhaling a breath of air... except no one is recycling the air and it's getting a little stuffy in here.

    It's one reason people have big weddings... to make it so expensive that you think twice before throwing it away on a mere argument. If throwing away a machine were more expensive, maybe we'd think twice about doing it... or better still, about buying one in the first place.

    Yes, it would hold back progess. But where is progress leading us right now? With luck, we'll have computers powerful enough to solve the problems we created by having computers. And without luck, we may poison our world and all die. Ah, yes, the smell of progress is all around us.

  • I am the proud developer of the actual site that TFA is linking to, you can see it at: http://umanitoba.ca/mainframe [umanitoba.ca] We are all amazed by the popularity of this event! And just for the record, the mainframe was RECYCLED so don't worry, we are very environmentally friendly here at the U of M!

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