NASA Shuts Down Its Last Mainframe [View all]

[pokerfan]

I cut my eyeteeth on IBM mainframes and keypunching...

Sittra Battle of the Marshall Space Flight Center shuts down NASA's last mainframe computer. Credit: NASA

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.”


An IBM 704 mainframe from 1964.

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.”

More: http://www.universetoday.com/93580/nasa-shuts-down-its-last-mainframe-computer/