Why won't you DIE? IBM's S/360 and its legacy at 50 IBM's System 360 mainframe, celebrating its 50th anniversary on Monday, was more than a just another computer. The S/360 changed IBM just as it changed computing and the technology industry. The digital computers that were to become known as mainframes were already being sold by companies during the 1950s and 1960s - so the S …
Likewise started at Galileo and still programming z/series mainframes.
Amadeus have been saying for years that they don't do mainframe, so I'm a little surprised that they still are :-/
One quibble with the article: "The mainframe is expensive and, at its core, it is also proprietary." The mainframe is not expensive per transaction. Most hardware is proprietary. Ask Mr. Intel to tell you how his chips work and he'll give you a big PFO. Most bits of the mainframe are open system (the source is available for them to registered users), OSA cards being one of the few exceptions I'm aware of.
I wonder why it is that many articles and discussions about the history of IBM (and mainframes) avoid the subject of their part in the holocaust?
While it's true they deny an awareness of the use of their counting machines, it's a matter of record that they did supply the punch card census machines (mainly through Dehomag, the IBM subsidiary in German, and Watson Business Machines in the US).
There's the financial impact to IBM, they made a lot of money from Nazi Germany before and during WW2, then there's the technological importance of drawing all information to a central place for processing (which is in essence "mainframe" technology).
Surely you can discuss these two crucially important historical milestones without implicitly approving of it, or is it really that insignificant? or is the subject avoided purely because of a "ooh.. we better not discuss that mentality?"
"I wonder why it is that many articles and discussions about the history of IBM (and mainframes) avoid the subject of their part in the holocaust?"
I wonder why it is that many articles and discussions about the history of Boeing (and long-range passenger travel) avoid the subject of their part in the burning 100,000 civilians to death in Hiroshima and Nagasaki simply to intimidate Stalin?
Because it's not relevant? Many, many US companies made money selling stuff to the Nazis (the US being the only non-Axis country to increase exports to Nazi Germany); Norway sold them iron ore which was used to build tanks.
The key difference between IBM and Norway is that the Norwegian iron ore was, for the most part, used to annihilate combatants. The IBM/Dehomag kit was used to tabulate civillians with a view to calculating when their usefulness to the Reich had expired. The book "IBM and the Holocaust" by Edwin Black makes the case that the Holocaust would not have been possible on such a large scale without IBM tabulating machines.
I take your point that an article on the S/360 may not be the place to raise this issue, unless you were to take the view that the later mainframes were a derivation of the earlier tabulating machines. They did largely the same thing, after all, just substantially faster.
@DestroyAllMonsters:
You are effectively telling me that size matters, such that Mao and Stalin's purges are more noteworthy as they killed more people. Leaving aside that this is highly debatable, it is a question of efficiency (interesting use of the word "better" btw ;-) )
Suppose we asked IBM whether it would prefer to be the largest tech company in the world or the most efficient. Even pre-'93 I expect the answer to that would be "most efficient", because efficiency will lead to growth (well, unless your competitors all club together and start shooting at you, as happened to the Germans).
In truth, the situations are different. Neither Stalin nor Mao were facing a war on 2 fronts at the times of their worst excesses. They had no need for the people they purged. On the contrary, the Nazis needed to make efficient use of the workers in the death camps and they made a telling contribution to the war effort. How much sooner would the war have ended had the Nazis not had access to IBM tabulating machines?
Important though this is, is it relevant to this thread? Possibly. Is it relevant to this site? Certainly. Who were operating the machines? I was chilled to the bone when I understood how the IT consultants of their time were so complicit in the deaths of millions. Previously I had always considered my profession to be mostly harmless.
In fact, as Stalin discovered in 1941, he did need the people he purged, the brightest in the command of the Red Army. Oops. In WW2, Stalin did not so much commit mass murder, as have an army with very high casualty rates because of the poor quality of the remaining leadership. It took until 1944 for the Red Army to have battle hardended generals again, with the notable exception of Chuikov (who was a military near-genius, his tactics at Stalingrad were superb and he thoroughly deserved to take the German surrender...however, I digress)
Mao's death rate was due to simple incompetence; the biggest disaster being the Cultural Revolution, when the transformation of agriculture took place without anybody considering what would happen to the rural farmers. Stalin's was similar. The high death rate of Russians and Chinese in WW2 was at the hands of the Germans and Japanese. No computers necessary.
We are fortunate too that Hitler made very inefficient use of slave labour, allowing a high death rate and ensuring that nobody ever got to be any good at their jobs. More intelligent bureaucrats who suggested using technicians in technical jobs were simply ignored by the SS. I suggest that the tabulating machines of the day were of little use to the Germans, not because they were themselves defective, but because Nazi "philosophy" meant that they could never be used in an efficient manner.
Fortunate indeed for the rest of us.
> Mao's death rate was due to simple incompetence
That's being too kind. The ruling junta knew millions would die, they simply didn't care: the individual was worthless, only the collective mattered. Insofar as they cared about the suffering and death at all, it was in a "one must crack eggs to make an omelet" way.
> Nazi "philosophy" meant that they could never be used in an efficient manner.
There were conflicting goals wrt the German use of slave labor: to produce products and services, and to exterminate undesirable humans.
@Arnaut:
While I can't argue with your observations on Mao and Stalin, I do question your last paragraph.
The Germans took the personal details of all those interned in the death camps and recorded them on the punch cards. The details recorded fell into 3 broad categories: their undesirability (Jewish, Communist, agitator etc), their useful skills (machinist, baker etc) and their current state (sick, unproductive etc)
They would use the tabulating machines to run queries such as "find me the most undesirable people without currently useful skills who may well die in the next 3 months". Those returned by the queries would be lucky to see out the day.
I would say the Nazis were far from inefficient at identifying the individuals with whom they could most easily dispense. You are, however, right in that these skilled workers could have been far better utilised by a non-genocidal regime.
>>So how did Stalin and Mao do better without the devil punch card machines?
Stalin was "killing" from 1927 - 1953 (26 years) as opposed to WW2 which was broadly 6 years.
The majority of Stalin's targeted killing was regional (people on specific land) and very easy to identify.
Mao was a similar story, there was no specific "target", just people on land.
I'm not sure whether you intended it or not, but you're emphasising my point of the post, the machines IBM supplied enabled accurate targeting and filtering of people integrated into an existing community with specific traits - unlike Mao and Stalin, if you honestly don't see the difference between the implementation of targeting sectors of society using technology and states that treated all their people as animals then you have no appreciation for history.
I once read about the bodies exhumed being identified as the Czar's family. Also something about Stalin saying once they're dead they're no problem. I once read there were four times as many Russians killed as there were Holocaust victims. That's 25 million people. So it looks like Stalin had too many problems to be solved by a punch card. Sorry for being so OT.
@Robert Long 1
You seem to be conflating using "an aircraft" with "machines specifically designed to enable the final solution".
Don't get me wrong, I do understand what you're saying, load of people traded with the Nazis before, during, between and after the wars (The Bush family made their fortune from trading war bonds and other financial instruments, the presidential race may not have been possible without it), but there's a huge difference (or possibly a fine line, depending how you look at it) between war profiteering and explicitly supplying a ground breaking technology specifically designed to enable extermination of sectors of society.
Put another way, if this technology (on which IBM is founded) was used for constructive social issues, say a national insurance or healthcare system, don't you think that IBM would have held it up as a pioneering tech? I'm not even talking about the relative right or wrongs of the system, merely the fact it's not discussed, because technologically, it was an achievement, on which IBM is founded, it's not just the money they made, it's the central database, standard interfaces, correlated data, centralised de-duping, automatic data processing, all those properties that define a mainframe.
I've got absolutely no axe to grind with respect to the American involvement in war, I just find it interesting that the subject is avoided, and given the impact of IBM the concepts on which mainframes are based, It seems to me relevant history.
"national insurance or healthcare system, don't you think that IBM would have held it up as a pioneering tech?"
Mainframes were, and still are, used for all of those systems. This WWII we are talking about. They were not selling mainframes in the 1930-40s. They were selling tabulation machines. Nothing to do with the mainframe architecture.
"explicitly supplying a ground breaking technology specifically designed to enable extermination of sectors of society."
It wasn't specifically designed for extermination, any more than Excel is specifically designed to count dead bodies. It can be used for that purpose, but hardly what IBM/Microsoft had in mind.... What IBM had in mind, both in the US, Germany, and everywhere else, was to use tabulation to provide census information. That was the original purpose of the tabulator. It was created for the US census. The Nazis chose to use their census information and further applications created on the tabulators for evil purposes, but you can't blame IBM for what they chose to do with information. There is nothing inherently malicious about a tabulator or computer. This isn't the case of a gun manufacturer providing guns to a sociopath and then claiming they didn't know what was going to happen. This is the case of a hammer manufacturer supplying hammers to someone assuming they were going to use those hammers for the same things everyone uses hammers for and then that person turning out to be a sociopath who uses hammers to kill people.
I don't see the relevance of the airplanes in the WW II effort to The Holocaust. I suppose the next thing you'll come up with is that the Colossus was responsible for millions of deaths. Duh! Besides, there were many more people killed in the fire bombings of Tokyo and Dresden then there were people killed in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
Considering that a) S/360 development started a decade and a half after V-E day, and b) somehow the author doesn't get around to mentioning Thomas Watson, Sr., yes, too early. And since NASA is mentioned, why don't we discuss the folks brought over from Peenemunde?
And I think that ca. 1945 the central place for processing to which information was drawn was general called a "file cabinet".
Hundreds of international companies sold the Nazis goods prior to WWII. IBM sold the Nazis tabulating equipment prior to the start of WWII, but they sold everyone tabulating equipment. IBM was the dominant force in data processing. It is like saying Microsoft is complicit in the Darfur genocide because they used Windows and Outlook to communicate or consolidate information. For all I know they did, but that doesn't say anything about Microsoft other than they sell software which people can use to accomplish their good or evil aims. The blame lies not with the computer or the maker of the computer, but the people using the computer.
IBM sold to the Nazis DURING WWII. They weren't 'on the American side', they were on both sides of that war. They didn't just let the German division work for the Germans: they oversited the German division, and sold required supplies to it.
How did they get away with it? Well, apart from the corruption of the American politcal process, after the war the American government hired German scientists and engineers and traitors like IBM, to help fight the emerging cold war.
"On the latter, a total of five S/360s had helped run the Apollo space programme, with one of IBM's mainframes being used to calculate the data for the return flight of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins - the team that put boots on the Moon for the first time."
But the model they used was NOT the most powerful available
at the time and even as Apollo 11 was waiting for launch
NASA were terrified that somebody would actually ask them about that.
Actually there was a good reason for that attitude.
In the space programme, where reliable systems are literally
a matter of life and death, what counts is reliability
rather than being 'technically advanced'.
And reliability can only be tested the hard way over time,
by which stage there is something more 'advanced' somewhere.
Why won't the mainframe die? It's because it works! Having been involved in mainframes for decades and then also working in the PC area, I can say the mainframe world is somewhat organized hand has some sense where the PC world is a nightmare. Ever hear of a virus on a mainframe? How about malware? Both created and prevalent on PCs but not the mainframe. I recall Bill Gates saying that "We won't make the same mistakes that the mainframe has done" but alas, the PC world not only made the same mistakes and more of them.
How about malware? Both created and prevalent on PCs but not the mainframe.
CHRISTMA EXEC.
Those who forget history &c.
This belief that malware is impossible under the various IBM mainframe OSes is simply ignorance generalized from the paucity of evidence to the contrary. But - as the Reg Commenter Chorus is so fond of reminding us - absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.1
In fact it's not difficult to create malware of various sorts in various IBM mainframe environments. Take CICS - prior to the introduction of Storage Protection in CICS/ESA 3.3, all transactions in a given CICS region shared the same address space and could stomp on one another quite happily. This is rarely a problem because mainframe sysadmins were picky about what programs they'd let be installed on their machines, and those programs were generally written in HLLs that offered amazing features like array bounds checking. But a malicious CICS application, running in a region without SP, can do all sorts of nasty things.
And it's still necessary to get permissions right in mainframe environments. If you're not careful with terminal permissions, a malicious app can issue 3270 Receive Buffer commands and screen-scrape data from privileged apps. And so forth.
Mostly there hasn't been a lot of IBM mainframe malware because it had been too expensive for researchers (of whatever shade of hat) to play with,2 and because there's a correspondingly smaller hacker community to help, and because it's not sexy like, say, breaking a major website.
1More precisely, it's not proof of absence. It is evidence, as any Perfect Bayesian Reasoner could tell you; it's simply weak evidence, and determining its probability with any useful accuracy so you can adjust your model is difficult.
2That situation has changed, for older mainframe OSes, with Hercules.
Only experience here is a regular x86 rack mount server that emulates the old OS and software, along with a copy protection USB dongle. The original terminal lines were translated to something that could be transported over ethernet, and each client had an ethernet emulation terminal client that mimiced the old green screen terminals. Except in this case, the colour was customisable. I would hope so!
I had to continually set the buggers up because the users were cutting and pasting data between the terminal window and Excel.
The whole time I'm thinking "there MUST be better modern software that isn't such a pain in the arse".
I used a real IBM 3090 mainframe when I was a PhD student.
Real 3270 terminals with the proper spring action keyboard and a twinax connection from the office down to the server room.
When we got an Ethernet connection for that machine guess what arrived?
An IBM PC in a box, complete with ESCON (?) channel adapter card and chuge cables, plus an Ethernet card. Yep, the mainframe used a lowly PC as an ethernet 'bridge'.
Unless I missed it, there was no reference to microcode which was specific to each individual model of the S/360 and S/370 ranges, at least, and provided the 'common interface' for IBM Assembler op-codes. It is the rough equivalent of PC firmware. It was documented in thick A3 black folders held in two-layer trolleys (most of which held circuit diagrams, and other engineering amusements), and was interesting to read (if not understand). There you could see that the IBM Assembler op-codes each translated into tens or hundreds of microcode machine instructions. Even 0700, NO-OP, got expanded into surprisingly many machine instructions.
"I first met microcode by writing a routine to do addition for my company's s/370. Oddly, they wouldn't let me try it out on the production system :-)"
I did not know the microcode store was writeable.
Microcode was a core (no pun intended) feature of the S/360/370/390/4030/z architecture.
It allowed IBM to trade actual hardware (EG a full spec hardware multiplier) for partial (part word or single word) or completely software based (microcode loop) depending on the machines spec (and the customers pocket) without needing a re compile as at the assembler level it would be the same instruction.
I'd guess hacking the microcode would call for exceptional bravery on a production machine.
Might be maintenance test and repair system? I remember seeing GHAT tapes on our Bull FE's desk. We started out with a level 66. One of our VPs told me that our Computer Services director was always asking for "More core, more core!" We only had 1.5 megabytes.
I did not know the microcode store was writeable.
It definitely wasn't. It allowed the possibility for the underlying hardware too support different instruction sets. A machine supporting APL natively was considered at one point - I think one was buit in IBM Research - but it was never implemented as a product.
A machine supporting APL natively was considered at one point - I think one was buit in IBM Research - but it was never implemented as a product.
I'm not sure whether you mean "such a machine in the 360 line" or "any such machine". IBM did sell an APL computer - the 5100.
A thousand engineers toiled to eventually produce one million lines of code.
1,000 lines of code per engineer, then. It doesn't seem much.
I honestly don't know anything about this kind of programming, but I assume whatever code they were using would generated an op-code per line, like assembler. I'd guess that you'd be lucky to send a line to a printer with 1,000 op-codes.
Can anyone explain?
The rule of thumb in use (from Brooks's Mythical Man Month, as I remember) is around 5 debugged lines of code per programmer per day, pretty much irrespective of the language. And although the end code might have been a million lines, some of it probably needed to be written several times: another memorable Brooks item about large programming projects is "plan to throw one away, because you will."
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