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The mainframe - where it all started!

It is estimated that there are 10,000 mainframes (computer dinosurs) that run many, many large scale applications in some of the top fortune 500 companies, banks and insurance companies in the world even today. Something that started may be 5 or 6 decades ago - it is still in existence and IBM is still the name to reckon with - in the world of mainframes. Hitachi, Fujitsu, Unisys - were some of the names that resonate with the word - mainframes.

From Vaccum tubes, magnetic core memory, magnetic drum storage, tape drives and punched cards to today's mega machines - that can house upto 240 server-grade CPUs, 40TB RAM and Petabytes of flash storage - several decades of travel has been nothing short of a magical journey. From batch mode applications written in Cobol/PL 1 and ran through several JCLs (think Shell programs) - mainframes served the needs of many large scale applications. Late 80s/early 90s saw CICS/DB2 - a major revolution from traditionally batch mode applications backed up by Sequential files (datasets as they were called) to a world of relational databases and interactive applications ( applications servers ).

From MVS to Z/OS - the operating system that runs the mainframes - saw a major transition. Logical partitions ( think VMs in today's parlance ) allow for multiple instances of OSes in various logical partitions of CPUs etc.,  Expensive, hard to maintain, require an army of personnel to support - but relevance of these machines are not gone yet.

Large companies - with large customer base - still have to deal with mainframes but these days - they run a version of Linux and support modern language stacks like Java and C. A long way from the days of Cobol and PL 1. 

As application developer from the dinosur timeframe - one is used to thinking data as many sequential files - indexed, keyed or relative as required. Moving to DB2 and relational thinking was a big jump in design thinking in the late 80s - early 90s. From there to today's distributed world - on the cloud - the travel has nothing but magical.



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