Are there still any companies/academic centers that use mainframes from 60s-70s?

Question

As a young software engineer, I often hear other colleagues talk about the days of punch cards and "computers as big as the room."

The earliest memories of computers that I have involve MS DOS and Windows 3.1.

My question is, are there still any companies, academic centers, or government agencies that still use mainframes from the 1960s-70s in their daily operations?

If so, can you think of a place that would allow visitors to observe such a machine at work? I know that there are several museums out there that possess such pieces, but I cannot think of a functioning one.

Answer 1

The business of our company (a car rental company) is based on a mainframe, originally installed in 1972. There is no signs of it being replaced in the near future - it would cost an enormous sum of money and several years of effort.

One of my previous employers (an airline company) also had a mainframe as the backbone of its operations. They started to work on its replacement a couple of years ago, but I don't know where they are currently.

So yes, there are lots of them still in use, especially at banks. Since typically these run business critical systems, without which the whole company shuts down, they are tucked away in safeguarded data centers. Therefore, unfortunately I don't think they accept visitors from the outside world in most of these places.

Answer 2

NASA at the very least. The retired space shuttles ran the same computer programs and equipment from initial commission. If I remember correctly, they had about 32K of RAM.

The reason they did this was that the software and hardware was known to be bug free, upgrading or changing equipment/software might have introduced life threatening bugs or have been prohibitively expensive to produce to such a high degree of bug free-ness.

Answer 3

The State of Michigan driver's license system still runs on a 1970s mainframe.

Answer 4

A lot of air traffic control systems use Univac systems.

Answer 5

When I was working at RAF Filingdales in the mid 90's, on the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System there, we were told that they couldn't directly connect anything but the original mainframe to the radar array, as it would be considered a violation of a strategic arms treaty governing the use of the early warning radar system.

I'm not now convinced that this was true, given the current National Missile Defence upgrade, but the original CDC-Cyber mainframe could still be in use if the NMD project has not yet been completed.

Certainly RAF Filingdales is not somewhere you should expect to get into legally without government vetting, though you could always join the CND instead. *8')

^{Given my doubts, I have created a question on skeptics: Are the computers connected to missile early warning systems limited by international treaty?.}

Answer 6

As far as software goes, sure. IBM, at least, has put a LOT of effort into maintaining upward compatibility. There's business logic that's still happily being used by a lot of large organizations.

As far as hardware goes, probably not:

1. The older systems are slow, and consume a lot of power, and consume a lot of air conditioning (or water cooling). A newer system of equivalent power costs much less to run; the hardware replacement costs are dwarfed by the power/cooling/space that's not used by the replacement.
2. There aren't many parts available for the older systems. Even when there are spares, it's going to be less expensive to replace an older system than fix it. The older the system is, the truer this is.
3. There are few people left to fix the older systems. The manufacturers (e.g., IBM) don't maintain them any more, and I doubt anybody's even offering training in how to maintain/repair the older systems.

Economically, it doesn't make sense to run hardware that's that old. Replacing it with newer (but software-compatible) hardware costs less, and gives you a system that's more reliable and more maintainable.

However, economically, it does make sense to run software that's that old, if the business logic is still valid. (But that's a whole other conversation.) So, yes, there are an awful lot of business still running software that was written that far back.

Answer 7

You can watch a Zuse Z3 in the museums in Munich and Hünfeld, Germany. It's the first fully functional, program controlled (freely programmable) computer of the world.

Answer 8

At my current company we are still using IBM TPF mainframes (several of them, given our performance constraints).

We are in the process (and have been for at least the 4 years I have been there) of migrating toward Linux-based boxes (swarms of them) with Oracle/MySQL/SQlite DBs (depending on the requirements).

It's a long and energy consuming task, but the mainframes are at their limits, and it would require buying even bigger/newer mainframes to replace them.