By Pat Toole, General Manager, System z,
The average consumer doesn’t physically see or touch a mainframe like they do their mobile devices.
The release of the first mainframe computer, System 360, 50 years ago sparked a revolution in computing and business processes that still affects consumers daily. In fact, most people can't function more than a few hours without taking advantage of something that the mainframe provides, but everyone takes for granted.
Since 1964, the mainframe has remained at the forefront of technology innovation and has enabled many industries to transform themselves. They include the first ATM, the magnetic stripe in credit cards, invention of the barcode and banking via mobile devices.
The mainframe has also revolutionized the way people buy things, educators deliver courses and governments deliver and manage social services. Some of the world’s most transformative technological advances in past decades—including the NASA space shuttle missions—were made possible by the mainframe.
Today more than 70 percent of enterprise data resides on a mainframe and 71 percent of all Fortune 500 companies have their core businesses located on a mainframe. Consider these facts as well:
Today mainframes are designed to support cloud computing and big data and analytics, technologies of today and the future. Here are some of its uses:
Porto Alegre, for example, has 1.5 million citizens in the capital city of Brazil’s southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul. Porto Alegre employs 500 people and hosts more than 300 applications. By using a mainframe, Porto Alegre created a near-real time a digital map of the city to better schedule maintenance work, reduce road closures, which is projected to achieve a 50 percent reduction in response times, and a 30 percent reduction in backlogs.
The mainframe has changed a lot over its life and will continue to evolve. From a technology performance perspective, the most recent (2012) system is more than 100,000 times more powerful and has almost 800,000 times more memory than the original System 360. With the 50th birthday of the mainframe, we not only mark a key milestone, but also anticipate future innovations to mainframes that will continue to evolve to support an increasingly digital world.
Visit Mainframe50 to read more about how mainframe-enabled innovations are empowering big opportunities in areas like cloud, mobile, big data and analytics, and secure transactions.
Pat Toole is the General Manager, System z, for IBM. Toole has held a variety of executive and management positions, including Chief Information Officer of IBM. Mr. Toole holds a master’s degree in business administration from Queens University of Charlotte. He holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Notre Dame and serves on the university's graduate studies and research advisory council.