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by hinkley 400 days ago
I was kind of disappointed the first time I saw an IBM mainframe and it kinda just looked like a rack of servers. To be fair, it was taking up a little bit of a server room that had clearly been designed for a larger predecessor and now almost had enough free space for a proper game of ping pong.

Hyperscaler rack designs definitely blur this line further. In some ways I think Oxide is trying to reinvent the mainframe, in a world where the suppliers got too much leverage and started getting uppity.
2 comments
toast0 399 days ago
My school district growing up had a decently sized Unisys mainframe. While I was working there, they upgraded to a new machine.

The old machine was about desk height and 15 feet wide. The new machine was a 4u box running a Unisys mainframe emulator on NT 4, on a quad processor pentium pro. Pretty sad. But they did keep the giant line printer, at least while I was working there.

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esseph 399 days ago
Nah, oxide is standardizing pluggable, scalable, rack-unit API driven local cloud, with extremely tight integration that nobody else has largely except Apple.

There's different takes on it, that's just mine. I really appreciate and respect their work.

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hinkley 399 days ago
They aren’t standardizing the way the PC was standardized. They’re making custom hardware with custom connectors. Their parts are interchangeable with themselves but the rack is the unit of delivery and operation. Their software is closer to standardizing in the normal sense of the word.

That’s a mainframe, sport. At their height they were modular and in at least IBM’s case they could run with damaged parts and were delivered with dark hardware that could replace damaged parts until a maintenance person could arrive, or be remotely enabled to increase throughput for a fee.

All of this cloud stuff, except the geographical redundancy parts, is recreating software that business had versions of forty years ago.

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steveklabnik 398 days ago
It really depends on what you mean by “mainframe.” Architecturally, we are nothing like mainframes. But for what mainframe seems to mean for you, I can see your perspective.

(While the rack is the unit of delivery overall, we can ship individual sleds and they’re operator replaceable, if say, one of your sleds dies, incidentally.)

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esseph 397 days ago
Some of us still touch mainframes, almost daily.
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