![]() ![]() “The oldest one I found so far is an IBM 7074, which is mainframe that was built in about the 1960s…It was considered a supercomputer for its time because it could do mathematic scientific calculations pretty well.” It used magnetic-core memory (instead of cathode ray tubes) according to Bellotti, and “One of the things that’s interesting about these machines is that they are still in operation in a lot of different places - not just the federal government. They had a Java application that was pretending to be a terminal to talk to the mainframe to scrape data from it, and then deliver it as a JSON API.”īut that isn’t even the oldest mainframe she’s encountered in a government setting. What the department wanted was a DB2 database, but “Rather than doing a really hard data conversion, they decided that they were going to build a driver that would talk to the IMS database and pretend that it was a DB2 database. ![]() “They are not the same schema in any way, shape, or form,” Bellotti explained. To give you some idea of the age of this technology, IMS databases are hierarchical, not relational. Used internally, this department had upgraded to a machine that, unfortunately, couldn’t connect to their IMS database. And one of her strangest examples was a mainframe that provided a JSON API. “I work with some really really old machines,” she told the audience. “Fortunately, I work for the federal government, so there’s really no shortage of things like that for me to play with.”īellotti was there to share stories about what mainframes are doing out in the wild today. “The systems that I love are really the systems that other engineers hate,” Bellotti told the audience - “the messy, archaic, half chewing gum and duct tape systems that are sort of patched together. ![]() So it was fascinating to hear Bellotti tell stories about some of the older gear still running, and the sometimes unusual ways it was paired with more contemporary technology. Or, as President Obama put it last March, it’s “a SWAT team - a world-class technology office.” Digital Service was designed as a start-up-styled consultancy to help government agencies modernize their IT operations, drawing engineering talent from Google, Facebook and other web-scale companies. Last month she entertained a San Francisco audience with tales about some of them, in a talk called “7074 says Hello World,” at Joyent’s “Systems We Love” conference.Ĭreated under the Obama administration, The U.S. Digital Service, Marianne Bellotti has encountered vintage mainframes that are still being used in production - sometimes even powering web apps. ![]()
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