Play audio:
On November 21, 2007, the University of Manitoba said goodbye to its beloved mainframe by holding a New Orleans Style Jazz Funeral, complete with a piñata:
Spark’s microphones were at the funeral, and you can hear the ceremony above, or download the mp3.
Yes—amazing how people—even from the old days..and I’m 61…do not understand what a mainframe is..vs toys….
So UofM shut down an old, obsolete mainframe. The machine that was removed was rated at 55 MIPS (a mainframe performance term) where today’s mainframes peak out at nearly 18,000 MIPS. Interesting from a historical point of view, but not relevant to today’s computing world.
Jim, what I found most interesting about the mainframe was the strong emotional attachment its users had with it.
Certainly more interesting than the technical aspect.
> not relevant to today’s computing world ?
The same programs that were saved on the U. of M.’s IBM System/360 mainframe, 40+ years ago, will still run on that 18,000 MIPS processor-complex. Try doing that today with a program created 20 years ago for MS DOS, and then try it again 20 years from now, on whatever your “desktop-computer” will look like.
IBM and AMDAHL provided “compatibility” for the mainframe users at the U. of Manitoba, spanning those many years, and that’s what is keeping the mainframe alive.
In these days of disposable everything – it’s a good day to remember and celebrate the passing of equipment which operated for nearly a half-century.
In the early 1980s I had a tour of the underground NORAD complex in North Bay ON. They were still using a 1950s mainframe to process inputs from the various radar sites. It was huge and I forget the memory and speed but it was rediculously low by even 80s standards. Banks of vacuum tube racks extended for a couple of hundred feet, and a tech would have scope or meter leads that were 50′ long. The control console was right out of the movies – 50 or so feet long with lots of flashing lights. A Polariod camera was permanently mounted facing the console so when there was a problem, they could take a picture then analyse what lights were on/off at the time. They were planning to replace them (2 tandem-style computers) the following year. A plus was going to be all the space freed-up (in addition to better processing). The minus was the loss of a significant heat source for the complex.
Len, that would be the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE)system, built by IBM. I’m told that for decades the system had the largest physical footprint of any computer. In this day of scalable parallel processing supercomputers, that may not be true anymore. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it still is!
Not only that, but you can still run your vintage 1968 COBOL apps on the same box. And you get all of this without having to increase your datacenter rack space, power and cooling utilization, property taxes, etc.
Sounds like a winner to me!