Over? We had a comm problem at work where some communications hardware upstream of our unix server was translating EBCDIC when it shouldn't. Our financial transaction processor (circa 2003) does the translation itself. oh man.... you have my sympathies. I guess I meant that *for me* they are over.... :-))
EBCDIC won't die as long as there are financial institutions, because those cheap sun-of-a-guns never throw anything away. It is rare for them to decommission a mainframe until it spontaneously combusts. Well, they won't run forever, nothing ever does. You have to remember that during the 60s and 70s IBM was the mainframe monopoly monster... akin to what M$ has become today....you did it IBMs way or you didn't play... thank goodness those days are O V E R also. You remember 2001 A Space O... HAL , was a word play on IBM (one letter off).... "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that..." .... the only way Dave could shutdown HAL was to smash
On Tuesday 19 September 2006 20:31, you wrote: through the airlock, climb into the neumonic memory bodily and start unplugging boards... ;-))
At work I understand they're experimenting with LPARs and running linux on some of their newer, big iron. It might even be suse, but us unix dudes aren't allowed to play on the mainframes.
Yes, but what a waste. Distributed processing (Beowulf style) is the future of digital computing (me thinks)... that what many of us are experimenting /researching these days. Why have one giant piece of, ah-- hardware, running multiple copies of linux... or anything else... when you can distribute the machine across a network of Beo-clusters for fractions of dollars using off-the-shelf parts? As a for-instance, Big Idea company... you know, the Vegietales people, made their Jonah movie by networking 500 linux machines together (all rack mounted pcs) rendering day and night for a couple of months... they didn't buy a mainframe with 500 LPARs.... :) -- Kind regards, M Harris <><