Plumbing in the data center

I watched an IBM mainframe service tech remove the jacket of his three piece suit, roll up his shirt sleeves, strike up a propane torch and re-sweat the solder joints on the copper pipe for the water cooling system of an ES/9000.

Awesome.

IBM systems and development trends

Unification is the word of the day. It did always seem odd to me that they went through all that trouble to get everyone on System/360, and then introduced a dozen other lines.

IBM had the right idea back in April 1964 when it announced the System/360 mainframe, and it even had a name that reflected its understanding of what customers wanted. The idea was that a single line of machines, using different processor and storage technologies, would be united by levels of abstraction that would allow them to all run the same applications, but just on a different scale and with different price points.

It is a lesson that IBM quickly forgot when it bifurcated its market in 1969 with the advent of the System/3 minicomputer, and I still believe that IBM did this for legal reasons in case the U.S. Justice Department tried to bust Big Blue up over antitrust issues.