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posted by martyb on Tuesday September 17 2019, @03:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the There's-nothiing-new-under-the-sun? dept.

http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.html

In the computer industry, the Wheel of Reincarnation is a pattern whereby specialized hardware gets spun out from the "main" system, becomes more powerful, then gets folded back into the main system. As the linked Jargon File entry points out, several generations of this effect have been observed in graphics and floating-point coprocessors.

In this essay, I note an analogous pattern taking place, not in peripherals of a computing platform, but in the most basic kinds of "computing platform." And this pattern is being driven as much by the desire for "freedom" as by any technical consideration.

"Revolution" has many definitions. From the looks of this, I'd say "going around in circles" comes closest to applying...

-Richard M. Hartman

A funny thing happened on the way to the future. The mainframe outlasted its replacements.

[Ed. Note: This story submission was my first exposure to the linked essay. Though dated from 2013, I found the essay eminently readable as well as making insightful observations of how dramatically the concepts and capabilities of mainframes have persisted for so many years. --martyb[


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  • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday September 17 2019, @07:30PM (1 child)

    by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Tuesday September 17 2019, @07:30PM (#895333) Homepage Journal

    Second would be the "mainframe vocabulary", a set of terminology that nobody uses except IBM, their customers, sales people, and organizations that are built around supporting IBM equipment. I would begin with the term "core memory".

    Personally, I'd begin with this [anvari.org] myself:

    "Q:" How many IBM types does it take to change a light bulb?
    "A:" 100 - ten to do it, and 90 to write document number GC7500439-0001,
    Multitasking Incandescent Source System Facility, of which 10%
    of the pages state only "This page intentionally left blank,"
    and 20% of the definitions are of the form "...... consists
    of sequences of non-blank characters separated by blanks."

    --
    No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday September 17 2019, @07:41PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday September 17 2019, @07:41PM (#895340) Journal

    I assume that the non-blank characters (as well as the blank ones) are in EBCDIC.

    While the rest of the computer loving world uses ASCII.

    ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI.

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.