On the eve of a milestone, one of the world’s premier high-tech machines is simultaneously new and old. It’s 50 years old, if you track back to its ancestors. It’s shiny-new and state-of-the-art if you’re talking about ones that come out of the plant today. That plant is IBM Corp.’s Poughkeepsie complex, and the machine is the mainframe computer.
Monday is the half-century mark for the industrial-strength computers that Big Blue makes. The good news is that they do appear to have a future.
All of the mainframe’s history is firmly planted in Poughkeepsie and Dutchess County, whose economy owes more to this single item than to any other thing made here.
So do legions of workers who wore IBM nametags over the generations and today still number an estimated 7,000, between the Poughkeepsie plant and the East Fishkill semiconductor complex.
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April 7, 1964, was the day IBM announced to the world the product of its biggest investment ever, a computer called the System/360. It was its first system built on “solid logic” semiconductor technology and one in which different models could talk to each other — both novel at the time.
Today’s descendants are vastly more powerful. Today’s largest mainframe can push through 52,000 business transactions per second.
Today, they are known as System z. New models of high-end systems are in the works at the Poughkeepsie plant, but under wraps. On a recent tour offered to the Poughkeepsie Journal, there was plenty of work in progress on the manufacturing and test floors.
In the Development System Test area, 165 big systems run simultaneously with their doors open. One walks through aisles lined with mainframes. The noise would be deafening but for the earplugs that the manager, Frank Collura, advises visitors to wear.
Big servers require a lot of air cooling and some have water cooling.
Engineers sit in another, quieter room, managing tests to ensure these new boxes will run all the software they’re supposed to. Mainframes are backward- and forward-compatible, meaning old programs and old data are accessible and new ones will be as well.
So what is the mainframe’s future?
It’s a vital question for the local economy that Big Blue built up. It’s a question sharpened by the uncertainty that has been cast over the chip-making site in East Fishkill by reports that IBM is exploring possible sale of its semiconductor manufacturing business.
Virginia Rometty, chairman, president and CEO of IBM, addressed hardware divestitures in the company’s annual report.
“We are not exiting hardware,” she said. “IBM will remain a leader in high-performance and high-end systems, storage and cognitive computing, and we will continue to invest in (research and development) for advanced semiconductor technology.”
But Larry Tucker of LaGrange is still troubled by the trend of shrinking jobs and increased outsourcing. He worked in many IBM jobs over a 35-year period, including some as a contractor, before it all ended about a year ago in another round of economizing.
He said the buildings where they do the hardware mainframes are not all IBM any more.
“They’re run by another company,” Tucker said.
Date: April 6, 2014