One of the main arguments for the relevance of COBOL is that it handled „95% of all Creditcard-Swipes“ or „95% of all In-Person Transactions“ or „95% of all ATM Swipes“. This number, like many other numbers, comes from the Gartner survey in 1997. So this number, again, only says that 95%1. of mainframe owners2. who […]
Over the last two years, IBM has made a few… interesting… choices. Choices that seem… untypical… for them.
To understand this, you need to know that – in the mainframe world – you don’t have multiple computers with one keyboard and monitor each. You have one central computer (the mainframe), which controls multiple keyboards and monitors (terminals) individually.A CICS transaction is when the mainframe sends or receives data to or from one of […]
After searching some topics w.r.t. Mainframes, YouTube suggested a video about Punchcards to me (that suggestion in and of itself is quite devastating for mainframes, isn’t it?). It was informative, but left me wondering about the encoding of the punchcards: which combination of holes in a column encodes which character? Luckily, the video mentioned that […]
I have a soft spot for everything that is Turing Complete. Whether it is built in LEGO, Minecraft or Conways Game of Life – I just love the perfectly choreographed dance of the bits and bytes. Because of that, I also enjoy seeing an IBM 1401 from 1959 run FORTRAN in this YouTube video.