On 9/30/2012 6:27 PM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
wrote:
On 9/30/2012 2:07 PM, James Waldby wrote:
...

New IBM mainframes are still being sold; see following link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_z9 for some of their
characteristics....

Well, doh...

I was speaking of the old power supply systems only--altho on looking I
don't/can't find any hard data on the Z system power requirements at all
other than "they're green" BS stuff on the IBM site.

They sure burn power, but no longer needs dynamotors or whatever those
goofy motor-generators are called. three phase 60Hz keeps them happy.
....

I was sure of that (or at least thought I was.. ) and I know the
larger server farms use oodles but nothing like the older machines.

I'm so old I'm of the day when we were still using the Philco 2000 w/
the 27 7-track tapes...and it was a (relatively) low-power as was first
transistorized machine introduced in the class...

Never had much occasion on IBM--after Philco were CDC or Cray shops
primarily altho ORNL did have an IBM by time moved to Oak Ridge I had
shifted my focus to embedded systems in a shift from one end of the
computing genre to nearly the other extreme...did a couple of small
tasks for X-10 on the IBM/DEC-20 combo but not enough to do more than
say ran a couple of jobs on them...SAIC had gone VAX and were trying to
do everything in house on it to pay the bill instead of using client
machine if at all possible when did have needs. But, for about that
period from the CDC before the PC was capable enough to do useful
simulation, etc., I was almost totally involved w/ robotics for REMOTEC
or monitoring/control systems for the utilities replacing/augmenting the
original nuclear station analog control systems once NRC finally lifted
the ban on their use in safety/control systems.

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