Main Frame Osaur

A cute, denigrating name for a MainframeComputer. MainFrame + (Din)osaur.

Dinosaur UniVacs, IBMs, ControlDatas. They're all at Compu-Promo: http://www.lileks.com/institute/compupromo/

Objection, Your Honor

If BigIron is related to Dinosaurs, then why is IBM (InternationalBusinessMachines) having record-breaking sales of the IbmSystemThreeNinety dinosaur these past few years?

Because they've discovered the ability to revive these Dinosaurs; it's called eBusiness (similar to the process discovered in Jurassic Park). It's the first time they've managed to get their marketing right! By getting people to buy into their vision of eBusiness, they were guaranteed increased sales of such monoliths. In the '60s & '70s, it was buy our h/w and you have to take these services; now in the '90s and Noughties, it's buy our services and here's the h/w you need. Obviously, this is just my being cynical. ;-)

I think it's because of JavaServerPages. Do the work of 5 lines of PerlLanguage in 5000 lines of JavaLanguage and 512MB of RAM.

Ahem. I think it's closer to do the work of 5 lines of CobolLanguage in ... 5 lines of COBOL??? As people scale their WebSites into the ridiculous range, they find out that their BackEnd systems need to get bigger as well.

I think it's because people are starting to realize that we're moving back towards software-as-a-service. I mean, SOA? That's got "MainframePenisEnvy?" written all over it. And, as I understand things, the higher-end z-Series computers support hot-swappable CPUs (among other things), so that you can guarantee system uptime. When working at a former ISP, I remember how many times we had to take servers down just to replace a CPU fan, sometimes costing our larger clients large sums of cash. If they had redundant CPUs, this wouldn't happen.

CategoryMainframeComputing; CategoryComputerCompany; CategoryHardware; CategoryComputerArchitecture