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back to article Nearly half of IBM's $1bn Aussie framework deal comes from mainframes

IBM has scored itself a AU$481m ($357m, £277m) mainframe contract with the Australian Department of Human Services. The revelation that half of a larger mega-deal rests solely on mainframes sheds more light on what's holding up Big Blue's financial position. angry employee IBM loses mainframe docs down the back of the web, …

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  1. bigtreeman

    final solution

    quote from IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black

    "

    Quickly, the notion of sterilizing the physically undesirable expanded

    to include the socially undesirable. So-called anti-socials, that is, misfits who

    seemed to be unsuited for labor, became special targets. A leading raceolo-

    gist described anti-socials as "those who, based on their personality, are not

    capable of meeting the minimum requirements of society, i.e., personal,

    social, and volkisch behavior." One official definition cited: "human beings

    with a hereditary and irreversible mental attitude, who . . . have repeatedly

    come into conflict with government agencies and the courts, and thus appear

    ... a threat to humanity." Included were traitors, race violators, sexual per-

    verts, and "secret Jews." But, the numerically largest group consists of 'the

    work-shy and habitual parasites'

    "

    I now look at IBM very differently, IBM is collecting data on everyone

    1 10 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: final solution

      Errr.. what the fuck are you on about?

      8 0 Reply
      1. Mayday
        Reply Icon
        Stop

        Re: final solution

        "WTF are you on about?"

        In short, there's a book out there that blames IBM for the Holocaust because the Nazis used IBM products (punch card technology etc) here and there. Personally I blame a bunch of c*nts for it.

        I'm not a huge fan of IBM, particularly in recent years with their staffing practices, however blaming them for these atrocities is drawing a rather long bow.

        10 0 Reply
        1. david 12 Silver badge
          Reply Icon

          Re: final solution

          IBM management were traitors in WWII. From my discussion with greybeards, that wouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone who had to deal with the IBM sales team in 60's.

          2 0 Reply

          1. This post has been deleted by its author

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: final solution

          Admittedly the behaviour of US corporations during WW2 is completely off-topic. However, just to clarify for anyone who is interested...

          The book does not blame IBM for the Holocaust. It merely brings to public attention that the managers of IBM - like many other leading American businessmen including, for instance, the infamous Dulles brothers - went on having profitable business relationships with Nazi Germany right up to late 1941. (And in some cases after).

          There is also this:

          "There is no doubt, however, that the company [ITT] owned 28 per cent of Focke-Wulf Aircraft, whose planes bombed American ships... In 1967 the American government paid ITT $5 million for damage to [Focke-Wulf] plants inflicted during the war by American bombers. The plants were, after all, American property".

          https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1973/9/1/the-itt-affair-pbrbemember-milo-minderbinder/

          2 1 Reply
          1. david 12 Silver badge
            Reply Icon

            Re: final solution

            It's not just that IBM made a profit out of both sides of the war. It's also the case that the IBM business model, then and later, was based on the superiority of their ancillary equipment: in the 60's you couldn't get IBM tape drives unless you paid their inflated prices for their mainframe computer equipment: in the 40's you could only get IBM cards and paper from IBM.

            So the IBM data processing equipment used to operate the Holocaust used punch cards that were only available from IBM subsidiaries controlled out of NYC

            Would there have been a Holocaust and WWII without IBM? Yes. But the machinery of war would have stuck, jammed and torn if not for the active support of IBM.

            PS: I've got an original copy of a magazine with a review of the original IBM PC. It says that the computer is ordinary, but that the keyboard redefined PC keyboards.

            1 0 Reply
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    An honest question

    "Grandad, what's a mainframe, and why would anybody want one?"

    5 0 Reply
    1. Brett Weaver
      Reply Icon

      Re: An honest question

      The big thing about mainframes, apart from size and speed is reliability. OS and hardware is generally pretty bulletproof and with the backward compatibility your software investment is preserved to a much greater extent than Windows. Also braces and a grey beard are not required as much as they are in the Unix world.

      12 0 Reply
      1. D_awesome_beast
        Reply Icon

        Re: An honest question

        Grey beards are indeed needed. The average age of a mainframe programmer is somewhat above that of a *nix programmer.

        z/OS does look very similar to Linux, I find I'm answering questions for our mainframe folks on how to do stuff at an OS level. Especially scripting.

        4 0 Reply
        1. Mainframe Bloke
          Reply Icon

          Re: An honest question

          Must not have very grey beards if your mainframe folk are asking OS scripting questions.

          Or do you mean bash/ksh/sh as opposed to REXX/JCL/CLIST which are the traditional "OS scripting" languages?

          Personally I wouldn't call shell scripts "mainframe OS scripting languages", but I agree, "mainframe OS" does also include Linux on z these days where of course shell scripts are de rigeur.

          3 0 Reply
        2. Jez in Syd
          Reply Icon

          Re: An honest question

          Do they still use JCL?

          3 0 Reply
          1. Mainframe Bloke
            Reply Icon

            Re: An honest question

            Yep

            //xxxxxxAS JOB (xxxx),

            // MSGCLASS=x,

            // CLASS=x

            //*

            //ASM PROC M=

            //PRINT EXEC PGM=IEBGENER,COND=(1,LT)

            //SYSPRINT DD DUMMY

            //SYSIN DD DUMMY

            //SYSUT1 DD DISP=(OLD,PASS),DSN=&&SRC(&M)

            //SYSUT2 DD SYSOUT=*

            //*

            //ASM EXEC PGM=ASMA90,COND=(1,LT),

            // PARM='OBJ,NODECK'

            //SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT=*

            //*YSLIB DD DISP=SHR,DSN=SYS1.ASM.SASMMAC1

            //SYSLIB DD DISP=SHR,DSN=SYS1.MACLIB

            // DD DISP=SHR,DSN=SYS1.MODGEN

            //SYSUT1 DD UNIT=VIO,SPACE=(CYL,(50))

            //SYSLIN DD DISP=(OLD,PASS),DSN=&&OBJ(&M)

            //SYSIN DD DISP=(OLD,PASS),DSN=&&SRC(&M)

            //ASM PEND

            //*

            //SETUP EXEC PGM=IEFBR14

            //SRC DD DISP=(NEW,PASS),DSN=&&SRC,

            // UNIT=SYSDA,SPACE=(TRK,(10,10,10)),

            // DCB=(RECFM=FB,LRECL=80)

            //OBJ DD DISP=(NEW,PASS),DSN=&&OBJ,

            // UNIT=SYSDA,SPACE=(TRK,(10,10,10)),

            // DCB=(RECFM=FB,LRECL=80)

            //SYSLMOD DD DISP=(NEW,PASS),DSN=&&LOAD,

            // UNIT=SYSDA,SPACE=(TRK,(10,10,10)),

            // DCB=(RECFM=U,BLKSIZE=6114)

            //*

            //SOURCE EXEC PGM=IEBUPDTE,COND=(1,LT),

            // PARM='NEW'

            //SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT=*

            //SYSUT2 DD DISP=(OLD,PASS),DSN=&&SRC

            //SYSIN DD *

            ./ ADD NAME=TEST

            ./ NUMBER NEW1=00010000,INCR=10000

            // DD DISP=SHR,DSN=SOLVE.CC2DSAMP(CCACF2FX)

            //* THE M= NAME MUST MATCH THE ADD NAME= NAME

            //TEST EXEC ASM,M=TEST,COND=(1,LT)

            //

            4 0 Reply
      2. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: An honest question

        Mainframes today are still very fast indeed - especially when it comes to handling many, many simultaneous users and performing database operations and transaction processing.

        They are not "big" any more, though, in a physical sense. A low-end modern IBM mainframe could be mistaken for a PC.

        4 1 Reply
        1. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: An honest question

          Why are you comparing mainframes with consumer PCs? When you compare the costs that's like asking "did you know a Bugatti veyron is faster than a roller skate?"

          0 0 Reply
        2. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: An honest question

          Mainframes have been matched and surpassed by other kit.

          Software has given other kit RAS features, scalabilty, performance and throughput that once were the exclusive areas where mainframes dwelled, all at lower acq and TCO pricing.

          This is the reason why all but IBM has got out of this business: the game was up.

          As for security being better on M/F, LOL. Any qualified IT security person will be able to point out vulnerable environments, regardless of back-middle-front end.

          The only thing keeping people in M/F is legacy applications, that are too expensive to be rewritten.

          Other than that, this is a dying business.

          1 2 Reply
    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: An honest question

      Once upon a time if you wanted anything like VMs, mainframes were the only way to go. Very large processing jobs meant either a mainframe or a bleeding edge cluster. The kind of large batch jobs that banks and credit card companies ran on - also a mainframe.

      Over time commodity technologies have caught up, or clustering and distributed technologies replaced the monolithic beasts. So mainframes are constantly looking for things only mainframes can do. The latest is that they do security better (no, really they do). How long this can go on is anybody's guess.

      3 0 Reply
    3. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: An honest question

      "Grandad, what's a mainframe, and why would anybody want one?"

      Mainframes are generally a hell of a lot more robust than than the cheap commodity tat that gets shoved out elsewhere. Why wouldn’t you want one?

      3 2 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: An honest question

        One of the first newspaper articles I ever wrote was about a mainframe system in Bournemouth with clients in the USA and Australia. Due to the 10,000-plus-mile distance to Australia, the normal maximum response time of one second was relaxed to 3-4 seconds. Users in New York consistently got sub-second response.

        When did you last see a server other than a mainframe that could provide hundreds of simultaneous users with sub-second response times?

        I have owned more than a dozen fairly fast PCs running versions of Windows from 3.1 to 7, and even with a single user they don't always respond in one second - or even five. That's largely because it has never been a design goal of Windows to give the user immediate response.

        3 1 Reply
  3. Anonymous Coward
    Holmes

    Hadn't been planned well?

    Hmm,

    "Big Blue managed to upset lots of greybeards when it accidentally severed web links to its z/OS mainframe documentation a few weeks ago. The company suggested this was a pure SNAFU thanks to internal website changes that seemingly hadn't been planned as well as they should have been"

    Things do break, but I wonder how sensitive IBM is to ensuring they get the basics right? They have had quite a few well publicised failures (and costly!) that could all be attributed to the same statement of "seemingly hadn't been planned as well as they should have been"

    0 0 Reply
    1. antiquam bombulum
      Reply Icon

      Re: Hadn't been planned well?

      Having been driven to distraction by their godawful excuse for a website for a number of years, I really wonder how anyone knew that the links didn't go anywhere, as opposed to stuff just being unfindable by any reasonable process. It is the absolute worst website I have ever had to use. If someone had set out to design an obtuse website, they could not have made one as bad as this one. Finding patches, updates and documentation is excruciating. I don't think those twerps have any idea at all about what a decent site should be like to use, nor do I think they care.

      1 0 Reply
  4. onefang
    Alert

    "AU$481m ($357m, £277m)" ... "$1bn ($742k, £575k)"

    Could we have some consistency here please? 481 million Aussie dollars, 357 million dollars from some random country, 277 million presumably UK pounds, 1 beeeellion unknown dollars, 742 thousand dollars of unspecified currency, and once more 575 thousand perhaps UK pounds. (I have no idea, do countries other than UK use £ for their currency? I know others use something called "pounds".)

    Assuming in each group, the first is Aussie dollars, the second is USA dollars, and the third is UK pounds, did the Aussie dollar suffer a major drop in value between writing the first and second paragraphs? I hope my pension gets a few zeroes added to the end of it if my cost of living is about to go up that much. I'm too scared to ask, whose definition of beeeellion did you mean?

    3 0 Reply
  5. Hoddo

    Most mainframes are better designed, configured and installed better

    They have to be, as they are almost always CRITSIT to the using Enterprises. That's why you tend to pay to use them. Almost fifty years of continuous development and focus, building on the previous generation of systems and technology. Why a mainframe? How many of you have already bought a Tesla? Why Not?

    Ahhhh! Reliability? Scared of a past few car fires? Not sure you can get mechanical support when it's urgent? Want to wait for a few more generations of development to happen? Not sure the company will be there in a decade? Perhaps that's why IBM and Z/OS. Its an Enterprise Risk Mitigation treatment for the REAL-CRITICAL data and processes. Those of you who HAVEN'T worked with Z/OS or past generations, really don't know what you are talking about.

    5 0 Reply
  6. ExHDS ExIBM ExThe Valley

    The only people who say Mainframe is a dying business are VMware people. VM's and containers have already been available on for decades on the M/F. The only thing i see going out of business is start-ups.

    3 1 Reply
  7. Bansisingh

    But skepticism among shippers remains, crystallized by Andrew Nutting, former director of international logistics at Bob’s Discount Furniture, who started a thread on LinkedIn Friday questioning a report that claimed the solution could reduce “shipping times” by 40 percent. “For argument, let us say the typical transit from [Shanghai] to [Los Angeles] via ocean is 14 days,” Nutting wrote. “Is it the case IBM is saying they will cut this to eight days? This is my biggest criticism of [blockchain] technology, the over-exaggerated claims. Shipping times get cut nearly in half, by having a distributed ledger of data?”

    He will burn in hell for that heretical thought.

    1 0 Reply

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