What even is a mainframe? I’ve been involved in software and infrastructure for 20+ years, I understand data centres, servers, services, microservices, databases, HA/SPOF, clusters and all the cloud equivalents, but never came across a mainframe. It’s almost a legend – are mainframes a real thing? What do/did they do? What’s happening to them? Where are they?
In: Engineering
So, I was raised on an IBM mainframe Z/OS with TSO/ISPF. Mostly running SAS for an insurance company.
Others have describe the technical side, but working on it was actually kinda cool. You were able to do great word processing with IBM/DCF and print your documents on a laser printer capable of printing unproportional fonts. Man, that looked cool in a time years ahead of private dot matrix printers even being a thing.
And you could include your graphs from SAS/Graph too. Absolutely not WYSIWIG as your monitor would be a 80*24 monochrome [3278 terminal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MNACTEC_keyboards_(31123571395).jpg). So you’d print and then wait for the internal post system to deliver at your desk. Later I was promoted to a 3179G terminal.
Most people will agree that the 3278 keyboard has never been matched. Each key individually weighted. Solid and delightful.
Another typical pause in your work day was if your interactive job addressed a file or dataset on tape. Then you’d wait for the tape guy to mount the tape and (re)load the data to disk. Later that was done by robots speeding up the process.
And you could send messages to other users using the command “TSO Send”. Years ahead of email and text messages. Especially fun if you accidently texted every user logged on.
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