Same location, different times

I was talking to someone tonight who said that it looked like there would be a new layer of bureaucracy applied to how their z/OS system was managed. It made me think of way back, when I first worked for IBM … Hursley’s “production” systems had a level of process and change control. Though as those boxes were all used for development activity it was still less hidebound than you might get (or hope for) in a banking datacentre. But our department had its own mainframe, under more local control. The sysprogs lived on the same corridor, and would do pretty much whatever you needed. Especially after a lunch meeting at the Dolphin.

And then I realised that our MVS system – probably an IBM 4381 if I remember right – was likely sited at pretty much where my desk is now. A desk which I’ve only seen a couple of times over the last year, but where I had to go yesterday after an area-wide power outage that had taken out an old desktop Linux box that would blow away that 4381 with its processing capability. Some of what’s now desks used to be a mini-machine room.

Linux desktop in Hursley
The Linux PC with more power than the mainframe that once sat here

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