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Building the System/360 Mainframe Nearly Destroyed IBM

(spectrum.ieee.org)
169 points rbanffy | 1 comments | 08 Apr 25 07:30 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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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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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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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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1. 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.