The curious invisibility of IBM mainframes

IBM continues to sell evolutions of its old "System 360" and "370" mainframe technology, first introduced in 1964.

Although very powerful, these systems maintain an enormous amount of legacy hardware and software including an outdated EBCDIC code for characters completely incompatible with ASCII (in which, for example, an hex 40 is a blank) and support for "job control language", a very primitive way to specify batch computer jobs with accretions in the Rexx programming language for conditional steps and repetition.

The Rexx programming language, although almost unknown outside the IBM world, plays an important part inside the mainframe world. It was designed as a rather modern and block structured language by IBM Fellow Mike Cowlishaw on his own time in the early 1980s because of his frustration with a separate, primitive "job control" language, EXEC-2.

Rexx preserves a memory of IBM's mainframes immediately predating the 360, since before the 360, IBM marketed two separate kinds of big iron.

For "scientific" data processing, the old mainframes supported fixed word lengths and binary computation.

For "business" data processing, the most widely used mainframe, the IBM 1401 (announced in 1959) used an unlimited word length and decimal computation. This feature was preserved in the way Rexx did and still does math; it supports unlimited size numbers and calculates precise decimal results.

What's interesting (cf. http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/hardware/) is the continued viability of big iron given the rhetoric of the past thirty years.

The rhetoric is that all efficient and effective computation that structures our lives occurs on small computers and harmonious networks in which ordinary people and small businesses harmoniously out-compete the "military industrial complex".

This is clearly nonsense.

The military industrial complex and its control of information on large and now invisible servers controlled by the putatively out of date mainframe, conveniently running Linux written for them as a courtesy by Linus Torvaldys although he had no idea that that's what he was doing, structured and continues to structure daily life.

It's a virtualization machine. Virtually, insofar as it runs Linux, it's using slave labor in a canned fashion, sliced and diced. Virtually, it combines your mortgage with thousands of others to the extent that you never know who owns the damn thing.

Its massive surveillance and control of the commanding information heights meant that the American government was able to drag its people into a war under false pretexts and may yet cause a useless war against Iran.

It also renders people powerless against constant changes in hospital bills and credit card fees that put ordinary people into a fine-print debt cycle, because even a conscientious person with a mere personal computer cannot outrun Citibank. People often pay invalid bills because the consequences of a sixty or even thirty day overdue balance can rapidly propagate.

By providing the raw power to "slice and dice" mortgages, mixing those held by honest people with criminal scams, it's made new credit inaccessible to thousands of honest Americans.

As the directors of the documentary film "The Corporation" point out, the ability to make money no matter a market's direction through options and hedging caused financial analysts on September 11 to rejoice at the increase in the price of gold...despite the fact that they'd lost friends.

On ordinary networks it creates a perception of personal powerlessness which causes any one participant to be regarded by others as an object and never a subject, resulting in vast quantities of slave-like flaming.

In 1970, rock concertgoers in Grant Park threw rocks through the window of Roosevelt University's computer center, but Bob Dylan knew that the executioner's face is always well hid. I learned shortly thereafter that union members controlled the access of the administration to the punched-card data, and they continued until Roosevelt's administration outsourced data processing...because of the bloody-minded soldiering that I'd had to deal with as a temporary manager, in which any learning of any new procedure was "not in my job description".

I sound as if I'm anti-union. I'm not, any more than Nicholas Sarkozy is.

Instead, I feel that alienation is the problem, whether it's the alienation of a union member who wouldn't let me program something to replace hours at a card sorter in the old days, or the alienation of a President from human feelings and the consequences of is actions.

Mainframes were terribly interesting in their day but today I have to adhere to the Buddhist notion of "right livelihood" and serve people as a teacher to avoid the long-term insanity of "data processing": the wasted nights and days solving puzzles that had nothing to do with human needs.