An old friend is retiring and I am quite sad..
10So, as those of you, who have listened to my bitching lately, are aware, we are retiring my old friend -- the mainframe -- today. It makes me quite sad to say good-bye to my MPS chewing comrade. I knew him intimately, having bent his thinking to my will, changed him in ways he never imagined, worried about his well-being even when I was not in the office. We met up every work day and he would show me the error of my code, he would spit out green letters on a black screen, he would blink at me when I input a questionable value. How I will miss our daily collaboration!
Good-bye, my dear friend, I wish you well..
Any ideas on a fitting ceremony to say farewell??
P.S. God Darn it, my mainframe never once thought I was a ROBOT!!!!!!!!!!
- 10 comments, 13 replies
- Comment
Can you make him play Something Went Terribly Wrong or at least just scroll the text endlessly?
Seek to the same spot on the disk drive over and over. Watch it walk across the room.
When they retired the mainframe where I work, we had a celebration in the conference room. Management put together a cute PowerPoint presentation that allegedly showed a camera pointed at it in the computer room. As we did a countdown to its demise, the mainframe would say things like, “are you sure?” and “does Monica know about this?” (her department used it the most). At the end of the countdown, the PowerPoint presentation showed the mainframe going up in a mushroom cloud. We were all sad and mourned the loss of our “friend”. Refreshments were served.
Just think of all the power you will be saving...
@thismyusername quality of power usage matters as much as quantity...
@duodec ok then think of how many more mips they will get per watt with the new system.
@thismyusername and how much of those mips will be wasted on bloated code, weather bug, the ask toolbar, layer upon layer of patches bandaging over poorly designed code, security flaws, potentially unwanted programs, AV software, etc, rather than being applied to the actual job the computer is supposed to be doing.
Sympathies. We're a DEC shop (VMS) that is slowly devolving into a wintel-toy-factory. I hope at least some of the remaining systems last until my retirement; working on wintels full time would be just too depressing.
@duodec There's still SPARC, and I hear POWER is making a comeback.
@dashcloud I believe IBM is still trying to keep POWER alive. VMS is actually currently being ported from the IA64 Itanium to the Intel x64 platform (meaning it should run on commodity, albeit higher end commodity servers, finally), and is still supported and being upgraded on the IA64.
I hope it survives and prospers but its unlikely we'll get to play in the deep end anymore; splashing around in the wading pool with the wintel toys has taken over.
@duodec HP-UX is still around and kicking on fancy hardware.
@mikibell Not sure how I forgot this one, which is probably the best thing to do:
@dashcloud
Is it just me, or is that vid seriously too long and boring?
@f00l It might not be you- this song did end up on worst song lists.
I miss a few 360's and 370's. I dont miss the manuals tho.
I knew someone who took one decommissioned one home as a project. Or as a friend, you choose which. I think he had do prep his flooring?
But he moved and i moved and i dont know if the relationship survived.
@barney .. please send purple wishes -- going on an interview today, I think -- VP requested 15 minutes of my time. Not sure if that is good or not..
@mikibell How did it go?
Hopefully the VP wanted to congratulate you (and maybe give you lots of money?)
@dashcloud hahah I think I got the new job.. but I fear it is going to be caboshed because we have another release coming up.. :( I am over the because he said he would wait until this go-live is stable if it became an issue.. I didn't realize the 15 minutes was really an interview -- I thought it was a meet and greet.. not lots of money, but a wonderful opportunity!!! I hate waiting..
Thank you for asking!!!
@mikibell Glad to hear it! Hope it works out well for you.
@mikibell Aw gee, I'm sorry I wasn't around to give you purple wishes, but it looks like you did it without me. Yay!! I knew you could do it and you really deserve this. Congrats or is it too early to say this? Don't want to jinx anything...
@mikibell ask if you can bring your old friend along