[/caption]
NASA has just powered down its last mainframe computer. Umm, everyone remembers what a mainframe computer is, right? Well, you certainly must recall working with punched cards, paper tape, and/or magnetic tape, correct? That does sound a little archaic. “But all things must change,” wrote Linda Cureton on the NASA CIO blog. “Today, they are the size of a refrigerator but in the old days, they were the size of Cape Cod.”
The last mainframe being used by NASA, the IBM Z9 Mainframe, was being used at the Marshall Space Flight Center. Cureton described the mainframe as a “ big computer that is known for being reliable, highly available, secure, and powerful. They are best suited for applications that are more transaction oriented and require a lot of input/output – that is, writing or reading from data storage devices.”
In the 1960’s users gained access to the huge mainframe computer through specialized terminals using the punched cards. By the 1980s, many mainframes supported graphical terminals where people could work, but not graphical user interfaces. This format of end-user computing became obsolete in the 1990s when personal computers came to the forefront of computing.
Most modern mainframes are not quite so huge, and excel at redundancy and reliability. These machines can run for long periods of time without interruption. Cureton says that even though NASA has shut down its last one, there is still a requirement for mainframe capability in many other organizations. “The end-user interfaces are clunky and somewhat inflexible, but the need remains for extremely reliable, secure transaction oriented business applications,” she said.
But today, all you need to say is, “there’s an app for it!” Cureton said.
NASA has given the go-ahead for SpaceX to work out a plan to adapt its…
The JWST is astronomers' best tool for probing exoplanet atmospheres. Its capable instruments can dissect…
First light for the Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) is quickly approaching and the telescope is…
A beautiful nebula in the southern hemisphere with a binary star at it's center seems…
The history of astronomy and observatories is full of stories about astronomers going higher and…
The JWST keeps one-upping itself. In the telescope's latest act of outdoing itself, it examined…