@ArtifexBarbarus
I once spent a week in the Twin Cities at Unisys' HQ to get trained up on their "new" class of ES7000 mainframe servers that were optimized to run Windows Server 2003 Datacenter edition - While touring their company museum, my tour guide asked if I "knew the difference between and IBM mainframe and a Unisys mainframe", I shrugged and he gleefully said "Unisys mainframes suck, but IBM mainframes blow!" He then explained the difference was their liquid cooling, in which a ruptured hose in the IBM mainframe would cause the coolant to spray the inside of the chassis, whereas in a Unisys, it'd just leak on the floor,
@T3CKsnipes
Dave, was a pleasure helping give you a tour of the Z manufacturing floor! Absolutely love this video!
@TomCee53
The first machine that I was responsible for as a system programmer was an IBM 4341 back in the early 1980s. It was used for software development and testing running VM/CMS and supported 6 concurrent users. They’ve come a long way.
@alexhiatt3374
This is INSANE, every time you mentioned a feature I thought there was no way they could top it. And then they're just casually like "oh yeah and these 64 5.2GHz cores can also run 2 bajillion VMs and encrypt all of main memory and correct for cosmic rays"
@jerseybob4471
WOW! Quite a system. I started working at IBM in 1967 and retired in 2005. My first IBM system was the 360 model 50. It had a single 32 bit CPU and weighted 3 tons. The max RAM was 512KB and four I/O channels. The CPU cycle time was 500nS. RAM speed was 2uS. It managed about 200k instructions per second. We’ve come a long way baby.
@carlbroker
Data Scientist at IBM here, 1.5 years in. You nailed the current tone of IBM. Aren't they AWESOME?!
@tanjbennett4572
You overlooked a key reliability feature .. the IBM Z series includes extensive internal self consistency checking of the logic inside the CPU so it can detect when the logic fails and retry a transaction, shutting down the core if necessar. "Commodity" CPUs are tested after manufacture but after passing test most later errors are silent. Recent testing for silent errors in servers at Google and AWS have found that silent errors are quite significant. IBM has taken them seriously for decades.
@davidfirth1
I grew up in a mainframe family. Dad was 40 years at Burroughs/Unisys. I was a co-op electronics student at IBM, then worked summers at Burroughs/SDC/Unisys. My now employer of 30 years relies on IBM big iron, and the young folks coming in have no idea. All they see are the apps that still run green screens, not the heavy lifting happening behind the scenes. Thank you for this episode.
@MikeHarris1984
My company is the largest financial institution by assets and I joined in 2007... the funny saying that management says every year during planning... The mainframes are on their way out. Then every few years we do a massive mainframe upgrade lol... Those things are beasts!!! They chunk through data faster then anything else. You have to do a ton of custom integration, but damn, are they massive processing powerhouseS. When the micro second counts to make money in trades and bank transactions, nothing beats a mainframe. That single drawer is just one part. The mainframe is the full cabinet. You customize it by each drawer. In each of our data centers, we have MANY of the full Z frame setups. They are enormous and the redundancy is insane.
@KangoV
I worked on an AS/400 back in the 90's. One memory was coming in on a Monday morning to greet an IBM engineer in reception. He said that our AS/400 had suffered a cache problem over the weekend and had contacted them for help. He opened it up, replaced the CPU cache board and closed it. The system basically said "thanks" and it proceeded to speed up to full speed. Absolutely astonishing. And that was over 30 years ago.
@hessex1899
I am frequently a target of derision for my love of IBM Z series. Mostly because the love of IBM's big iron somehow contradicts my 50something OG 90's hacker quasi anarchist vibe. My detractors are rubes and I feel about them the say way that Christopher Walken feels about people that don't like hot dogs. I haven't finished the video yet but given that you are doing it and given the subject matter I a preemptively liking it. :)
@mikeklaene4359
In 1969 I landed a programmer trainee job at a department store in Cincinnati. We had a 32K 360/30 running 360 DOS and Assembler was the first programming language I learned. After being away from mainframes for 20 years, I applied for a position at a shop that had 6 System 390's. The hiring manage asked if I thought that I could still do assembler - I said if "D2" was still the op code for the MVC instruction - then yes. He was surprised that I knew most of the op codes and could even read a core dump.
@TheChillieboo
the reason your videos are SO good to me is that the parts i dont fully understand are still entertaining, i i think thats due to your delivery. no clickbait , no artificial suspense , just solid presenting. love it!
@jeffrey1025
I work at the Poughkeepsie facility you visited. It's very cool to see you here as you were one of the first channels that I ever watched when I started building computers many years ago. And now I'm working at IBM to put myself through school. Thanks for inspiring Dave!
@eplazai
You’re unstoppable, Dave! Hearing an engineer like you talk about mainframes provides invaluable content. Thank you for sharing your knowledge with the world.
@rilauats
30 seconds into this episode you already earned my thumb up. You're dead on target with this episode's core question (my creative alter ego rewrote your theme question) "Why a z16 instead of a PC with a 4090 graphics card and the perfect gamer mouse?"
@sjfsr
I finished 3 degrees in computer science and it's nice to have channels like this one to keep my knowledge fresh.
@charlesnicholas4758
I worked on IBM mainframes for 25 years as a systems programmer. Great video that brought back a LOT of memories. Thanks.
@jrherita
I love the pure brute force approach of these chips and hardware. I do see Epyc using some more advanced technology though lately — TSMC N5 and stacked 3D cache for >1GB of cache per socket. But that’s still not as complete of a caching solution as what these mainframe chips can do. Thanks for the tour Dave!
@stevekristoff4365