Video Tour of a Mainframe Computer Room circa 1990 Please also see my IBM Impact Printer Video

[Killtacboy]

OH GOSH! The cable management must be agonizing!

[Macmula]

I HAVE NOW WITNESSED A VIDEO WITHOUT ANY DISLIKES!

[TheRuddydoom]

this takes me back to the good old days of 2mb hard drives

[kinmanyuen]

lol i feel like an ant on a motherboard

[MrMerlinss]

Oh the new age computers......looking great

[adelgado75]

Takes me back to when I worked in a computer room in 1989.

[evilfreethinker]

96 MEG of RAM WOOHOO!! :D

[TheVisualev]

1990? No, I think in the 80's!

[TahreyUK]

3:40 "Halon will put out the fire, and any humans near it..." :-)

[evneck]

Yes, I always say my career started "under the floor" ... this is a very nice clip showing you my working environment back then!

[evneck]

Yes, I always say my career started "under the floor" ... this is a very nice clip showing you my working environment back then!

[tubefish57]

Wow...brings back a lot of memories from my days working in the data center!

[stormsirens2]

HOLY COLTRAB THATS A LOTA WIRES!

[pinkfloydeffect]

Oh god HAHAHA!

[Icebeam47]

It has enough ram for windows 2000! =O

[siggadoraj]

Dont worry guys, mainframes like this are still popular today and are actually on the rise, there is no change in the technology.

[siggadoraj]

Dont worry guys, mainframes like this are still popular and are actually on the rise, there is no change in the technology.

[girijeshdell]

That is really great. People really enjoyed their time. :-)

THANK U FOR THE VIDEO.

[girijeshdell]

That is really great. People really enjoyed their time. :-)

[CoolDudeClem]

How far we have come, to think that one of those can now fit in the palm of your hand!

[invnd1245]

Was it filmed in 1990?

[MultiIPwnage]

But, can they play Crysis?

[DarcyAerisWood]

But can you play WoW on it!

[SiquidProductions]

This is some stone age shit

[summer20105707]

I doubt a single high end computer replaces these. High end pcs in my opinion necessitate modern high end data centers to complement them. Remember people that the Internet is growing.

[summer20105707]

Eh :-) Quit picking on the VC20. At least it doesn't get bogged down with viruses.

[RoyHess666]

Can a todays single high end computer replace this whole facility? :)

[JoanLeaven]

I was born in 1980 so I didn't have the chance to work with that kind of systems. Today, everything evolves so quickly that you cannot really "enjoy" a system upgrade : it's just "been there, done that". We are so used to new technologies that we cannot be amazed anymore. Programming is so high-level nowadays that you are more of a philosopher than a programmer.

[poondoggin]

Haha we still have the same lieberts in the data center I work in. so old!

[cullyvan]

A mainframe is a mans machine. Todays IT specialists are welcome to their "nintendo"systems :)

[lostinxlation]

Good old days.

We used Mainframes to run logic simulations, line printers to output the results and magnetic tapes to back up the data. Computer rooms were NOISY and COLD back then !!

[hoser4]

Computer rooms are still cold. Instead of several racks filled with a single CPU, we now have hundreds of racks, each filled with 30 to 45 ATX motherboards, which believe me, generates at least as much heat as any mainframe would. You still need a butt-load of A/C to keep them cool!

[poondoggin]

@lostinxlation

trust me, they are still noisy and cold

[sm1else]

Oh wow. Such great memories. My mom used to drag me into work with her when I was a kid. That company was all IBM. I think they went from a 360 to a 4341 to a 4381 to a 3090 and finally to the Z Series. I interviewed at that company 20 years later just to see what the computer room looked like now. Didn't want the job but the walk through the building was fantastic!

[musoabledude]

excellent point.

[onionofdeath]

all of those tapes would easily fit onto my PORTABLE 500 GB hard drive with plenty of room to spare. We have come a long long way in just 19 years.

[TheMCMXXL]

Do you believe so? If you consider, that a Webpage, which consists of approx 4 KB of Information, has maybe a size of 600 KB, is it in my eyes no improvement. I guess that this old hardware is able to hold the same amount of information as modern consumer computers do and i don´t talk about such things like Flash Videos, advertisement banners or fat Word/Excel-Documents.

[musoabledude]

excellent point.

[declaration963]

1990 Supercomputer are slower than 2002 intel pentium 4 dekstop PC

[TheMCMXXL]

And the 2002 intel P4 burns almost of its power for bad programmed games, flash videos and generally for amusement. Wow. Everyone has a supercomputer at home, but it acts like a VC20.

[lostinxlation]

But vector computers were way cooler than P4.

[zf4hp24]

It's funny, today's "n-core" processors rely on a lot of the microprogramming, caching, pipelining, and locking stuff developed by IBM back in the 60s and 70s. VM, now all the rage, was invented by a few IBM guys at Cambridge in the mid-60s, along with virtual memory, paging, and dynamic address translation.

Nothing like sitting at the console and doing a power up of the entire computer room. It was like launching the Enterprise. I miss those days.

[CFlow375]

Man, I wish I was around during the heyday of mainframes like this. I would love to say I was one of those guys who knew how to handle those beasts.

Some people don't really understand how far we've really come in computing and technology to really appreciate it. Most just take it for granted.

Thx for posting this vid.

[SoldierDDR]

Yes! Today all people, mostly kiddys, say that theirs computer is to slow. This makes me cry as a mechanic for computers. A lot of good computers are thrown into trash.

[musoabledude]

excellent point. third in a row.

i suppose only clever, knowledgeable, nerdy folks land on videos like these.

[girijeshdell]

@musoabledude :-> Great words to honor this system.

[fishcomputer33]

@SoldierDDR Ugh I hate when people say that too. Mostly because I know they have a shit ton of viruses and random programs running in the background. :(

[mrsqonk]

@SoldierDDR I agree.. I still love the home computing 8 bit days and also this stuff..Kids always say "what aload of rubbish". Wish they'd understand the programming and the technical genious of what went into them..

[i8246i]

You know, mainframes haven't changed all that much. The tapes are about the same size, they just store more information.

These mainframes still require BANKS of cpus, redundancy and disaster recovery plans for data and power...raised floors...

[tommeken16]

@CFlow375 Totally agree. I'm 19 now and I must say.. I wish I was 19 or so back then. I would have loved to work with these people and those huge monsters and see the computer industry grow up like today

[NameNotaNumber]

I remember working in a room like this as an apprentice at a computer firm in 1990. They were supposed to be teaching me C but it didn't really work out that way. Anyway I just wanted to say that an old green screen VDU with nothing but text on it excited me 100x more than any of today's hi-res multi-million color screens. Guess that makes me a real nerd!

[halogenetor]

it would be able to handle more than that mainframe. sure the mainframe may be able to hande 4000 users in the year 1990; but if you consider that the 8 core xeon is running the same software as the mainframe then it wil be able to handle much more than 4000, possibly 40,000. If the mainframe were to be running lets say server 2003, it wound't have a hope in hell of managing all thoes users. Your not thinking about what your saying!

[i8246i]

"Your" not thinking what you are saying either.

This isn't some measly web server, its a mainframe operations center. It handles more operations per second than any computer or server can do by itself. The bank of CPUs (about 7 where I work) is NEEDED to process the TERABYTES of information that flow from the tape drives to the hard disk drives to the users and back again.

The amount of processing, the layers of encryption, and the sheer amount of data/sec can not be done with one cpu.

[halogenetor]

I'm not blind, I know the difference between a web server and a mainframe. What I am saying is that this mainframe, which is just a computer would and could not be compared to a modern computer in terms of processing power, speed, memory and storage space. And you could also consider in cost as well if you want.

[i8246i]

Thumbing down my comment doesn't make it any less true.

[toresbe]

Sigh, I assume those beautiful tape drives have been discarded now. What a shame!

[SonAvitch]

Oh wow this is where the term "wheel wars" came from.

[bubi1954]

Eunux & Windoze sucks - Long live the Mainframe !

[DrGomezNZ]

I really miss my old job as a mainframe operator and sysadmin. This is pretty much the same environment as I used to work in.

[cyborgtroy]

WHOO TAPE CARTRIDGE!

[compu85]

Haha: "The halon will put out any fire and any humans near it!"

[skipplet]

Damn, I remember going to work with my dad sometimes. Their computer room was EXACTLY like this one, suspended floor and all.

[halogenetor]

96 meg of ram LOL... so many 'boxes' for different things. Amazing to think now that a 8 cpu xeon server can do all of that and more

[darijo203]

much, much, much more :D.

But that was the most fun era of computing. These were the time when sys. admins were low level programmers and electricians.

[girijeshdell]

@darijo203 : ha ha ha , awesome, I missed that.

[jtel]

Cool.

[adelgado75]

This takes me back to my days as a Tape Pool Operator in 1989. Good times. Now they have VSM and it isn't fun.

[marshalauth]

I wounder if all the tapes are still there?

[Puzzoozoo]

Back in 1990(s) they were probably perpetuating the urban myth of the 'IT skills shortage' just as they do today.

[foca2002]

Hahahaha.

Man I belive this is true.

Every year since i start to know to read i read something about the IT shortage.

[tubologist]

Takes me back to my own start in IT in 1973 - working on a S/360 model-50 running OS/MVT. If I remember correctly we only had 512K of main storage - who would ever need more than that!!?? On the night shift we used to load up the open-reel tape drives with tapes for the nightly Master-File update job and three of us would go down to the pub, leaving the junior operator to read in the 15 trays of 80-column cards.

Happy days indeed...

[djypsydjazz]

The tape reel mainframe is from the late 60s. wow. thats pretty impressive.

[greenboy256]

My grandfather owned a company with a mainframe like this one, we still have a few of the old terminals and printers from it laying around in the barn.

[force311999]

this computer system has 96 megs of ram [3:15]

your pc has 1 or 2 meg of ram LOL

[VideyoJunkei]

I HOPE he meant gig!

[youmonkeytube]

No, in 1990 he meant megs. Most PCs couldn't take more than 4 megabytes at that time. And RAM prices through most of the 1990s were artificially high, inhibiting the development of more powerful software. While price/performance ratios were rapidly improving for processors & hard drives, RAM was barely keeping up.

[VideyoJunkei]

and ram prices had a lot to do with all the tape storage these machines had, to keep ram costs down.

[dinox4]

but 96 gigs of ram is a lot

[carlostinonsa]

Well by that time was a lot of RAM, but look at the field they talking is Server area, so is normal to see those quantity's.

Today's Mainframes contains thousands of RAM and dual core processors too, so if you compare its get short, looking that today some Falcon Northwest Desktop PCs have 13 GB of RAM.

96 GB of RAM, seems much, but to servers is not, that was 1990, we are in 2009 all has changed.

[DrGomezNZ]

He said "96 meg" of RAM. Not 96 gigs.

[masonb81]

Is it high tech ?

[Stevanhale]

The fire supression system is impresssive! "It will put out the fire and any human near it"(3:24) They would rather you die than risk the $5,000,000 computer!

[HailAnts]

Well, sort of. An alarm will sound for 30 seconds telling you to get out of the datacenter if you want to live! Then the Halon will discharge. Its not poisonous, just displaces all the Oxygen.

[marcor5000]

Thanks for uploading!

I really LOVE this oldschool stuff.

I think that more people should video-film their datacenter. It really gives i good impression of the time back then.

[censor48]

automatic tape silos called storage tek

[dwillson1]

old school that its best!!!

[rtfordy]

Thanks for posting, took me back to our datacenter. Was that an Amadahl CPU?

[careh1]

I'm not sure - there was Amdahl equipment in the room but that was a long time ago...

[jdobbs2001]

Hey you forgot to film the 3745 Front End Processor :) and the big bus/tag cables

[jdobbs2001]

Wow, we still have those cartridges

Holy crap we just unplugged those cluster controllers 3 weeks ago when we got rid of the S/390 and went to a zseries :)

[FranciscoPadilla]

This guy was excited by 96MB of RAM when now we can have about 2 GB of RAM in a laptop. I just imagine if my grandchildren will laugh at my excitement over 2 GB of RAM. I'm sure they will.

[gck86]

of course our grand children will laugh in the future.future computer will have more storage and ram up to perabyte or more to zottabyte.

[feckfull]

I watched this and realized I've grown old. Big thanks from an old school mainframe jockey, I'll be sending this to everyone in my shop.

[paulbrockenhagen]

Back around the Late 1990's I took a temp job at the 'Alltel Information Storage Center' in Jacksonville Florida. I remember the big tape machines and they also had "silos" for the latter cartridges wich were similar to 8-tracks. I thought it was kinda neat... I wonder if they ever updated??

[chem100]

Remember them well. I'm homesick now.

Seriously, thanks for posting this. Nice (and sometimes not so nice) memories.

[careh1]

Wow - lots of fan noise.