2023
Chapter 2
The mainframe is about business, and business is about people. As Santalucia explains, “So it's all about the people and the technology is great. Don't get me wrong, but it's really a lot with the relationships and with the people and getting people to understand what this technology can do for them and for their organizations and that's really what it's all about.”
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That’s an important differentiator from much of the popular theoretical thinking about computing technology today, with people such as futurist Ray Kurzweil propounding ideas like transhumanism, often with the implication that our technology will some day displace us. But the mainframe, even with the most advanced business-enabling features such as on-chip AI, is built to serve, not to sever, humanity.
The history of business is the history of humanity. Looking through the ages at the many stories, histories, artifacts and objects of art, the common thread of finance and business transactions is unavoidable, as is the progress of technology to more effectively process such transactions. From the abacus to mechanical cash registers to punch card processing, mechanisms for processing business data have paralleled the journey of humanity leading to the advent of electronic computing. Likewise, business processes and artifacts, from accounting rules to tax laws to currencies and ledgers, have been the symbols and data and frameworks for the transactions that constitute economies.
So, when the first electronic computers emerged, the paradigm of being fancy calculators was a natural perspective on their role. It took humanity-focused pioneers like Dr. Fr. Roberto Busa, who convinced IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson Sr. to adapt punch card machines to process alphabetic data, and Rear Admiral Dr. Grace Hopper, an early inventor of the concept of compiling English-like syntax into computer programs, to move our view of what computing could do, from mere technical computation to humanity-and-business-enabling processing.
During the 1950s, as electronic computing technology progressed from aspirational theory to practical devices, organizations that saw the business potential got involved in offering input to organizations such as IBM through means such as SHARE, the world’s first computer user group, founded in August 1955 to share insights and innovations among members and provide input to IBM on how to advance the business value of their nascent computing technologies.
This advice and innovation culminated in the April 7, 1964, announcement of the ultimate general-purpose computer, IBM’s System/360, built with an architecture designed to support the most demanding business organizations and positioned for the future with a promise of compatibility across models.
The industry uptake of this mainframe was immediate and sustained, as the IBM System/360 and its successors became a standard platform for doing world-class business processing, both in large batch volumes and real-time transactions.
Over the subsequent decades, not only innovations but also whole disciplines were born in response to the emerging demands of electronic business, as the mainframe showed itself to be the place where business results grew to new humanity-enabling levels, from data protection and availability to reliable and timely processing. And while it counts as a key aspect of security, the mainframe principle of Reliability, Availability, Serviceability/Scalability/Security (RAS) is just as much about doing business effectively. As Radcliffe says, “Guaranteed reliability, high transaction throughput, large amounts of data, high security requirements: all that's going to run in my Z environment.”
Today, the IBM Mainframe is the de facto system of record for the most important business data in the world economy. The business-enabling principles that have been intrinsic to its design from the beginning continue to pay dividends, as each new step of innovation builds ever-greater business value on top of this rock-solid foundation. Not only is it exactly fit for the purpose of running world-class business, but it’s ideally positioned to take on the most demanding and sensitive of established and emerging workloads now and into the future.
COBOL: “COmmon Business-Oriented Language” wasn’t exactly made for the IBM mainframe. Nor was the mainframe made for COBOL. Yet “Business,” their profound commonality, has conjoined them since the beginning.
Designed to get business results with intuitive syntax and variable definitions, COBOL was created to be written and maintained by business people, not technologists. As Radcliffe points out, “If you think back long enough ago, a lot of the COBOL developers were actually business analysts who were implementing business logic in COBOL.”
Designed with many of the same principles in mind by the International Business Machines corporation (aka IBM), the mainframe instruction set and architecture were built to enable the same business outcomes at optimal efficiency, from native decimal math, which meant lossless handling of pennies (which add up fast), to instructions designed to do massive character processing with the fewest possible actions.
But perhaps the most important business-enabling outcome from both COBOL and the IBM mainframe was the elimination of the need to constantly redevelop applications and other programs.
With COBOL, once the source code was written, it could be recompiled for new computer architectures rather than the rewriting of programs that architecture-specific machine languages required. With the mainframe, and IBM’s promise that what would run on one of them would run on all of them, once a program had been written, it likewise didn’t need to be rewritten for new versions of the hardware or operating system until new features needed to be introduced.
IBM has continued to keep this radical commitment to compatibility. As Walle points out about IBM’s mainframe software, “We spend a lot of time in development, making sure that everything we do is compatible so that new software can come into the customer shop that much faster to help them stay current and they spend less time doing upgrades and more time, you know, finding new value, putting new functions in getting them to work.