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Building the System/360 Mainframe Nearly Destroyed IBM

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169 points rbanffy | 7 comments | 08 Apr 25 07:30 UTC | HN request time: 0.734s | source | bottom
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froh ◴[08 Apr 25 11:24 UTC] No.43620418[source]▶
TIL that not only the software side was chaotic (served as the backdrop of Fred Brook's "Mythical Man Month"), but also the hardware side almost failed.

the article here ends around 1971 --- the mainframe would later save IBM again, twice, once when they replaced aluminum with copper in interconnects, and then when some crazy IBM Fellow had a team port Linux to s390. Which marked the birth of "enterprise Linux", i.e. Linux running the data centre, for real.

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mananaysiempre ◴[08 Apr 25 13:30 UTC] No.43621585[source]▶
> [Porting Linux to s390] marked the birth of "enterprise Linux", i.e. Linux running the data centre

Did it though? Or was it the gradual phasing out of mainframe-class hardware in favour of PC-compatible servers and the death of commercial Unices?

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1. rbanffy ◴[08 Apr 25 14:07 UTC] No.43621959[source]▶
> Or was it the gradual phasing out of mainframe-class hardware in favour of PC-compatible servers

Proprietary Unix is still around. Solaris, HP-UX and AIX still make money for their owners and there are lots of places running those on brand-new metal. You are right, however, that Linux displaced most of the proprietary Unixes, as well as Windows and whatever was left of the minicomputer business that wasn't first killed by the unixes. I'm not sure when exactly people started talking about "Enterprise Linux".

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2. kevin_thibedeau ◴[08 Apr 25 15:04 UTC] No.43622626[source]▶
Redhat was doing enterprise Linux well before IBM was involved. It was the rational platform for non-legacy .com 1.0 businesses.
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3. rbanffy ◴[08 Apr 25 16:17 UTC] No.43623442[source]▶
Back then I went with Debian, but I agree - the early scale-out crowd went mostly with Red Hat. Back then there was a lot of companies still doing scale-up with more exotic hardware with OSs like AIX and Solaris.
4. btilly ◴[08 Apr 25 16:56 UTC] No.43623908[source]▶
I first remember the term when Oracle ported themselves to Linux, began submitting patches, then began pushing Oracle on Linux to enterprises.

Oracle's big reason for doing so was because they could charge more for Oracle on Linux, and still get to a lower total cost of ownership than Oracle on Solaris.

Oracle began this in 1998. By 2006 they had their own Oracle Enterprise Linux distribution.

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5. froh ◴[08 Apr 25 19:33 UTC] No.43625639[source]▶
nope.

the first enterprise Linux was SuSE on s390, then came RH on x86 and then suse there as well. but RH marketing was better back then already :-D

6. mogwire ◴[09 Apr 25 06:10 UTC] No.43629348[source]▶
> By 2006 they had their own Oracle Enterprise Linux distribution.

By putting their name on Red Hat’s hard work and reputation.

7. pjmlp ◴[09 Apr 25 09:05 UTC] No.43630241[source]▶
> 1998: Many major companies such as IBM, Compaq and Oracle announce their support for Linux.

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux

It was all about Solaris, AIX and HP-UX for .com businesses.

I was there, our Linux deployements were only used internally, we never sold those workloads as UNIX targets on our product.