Kiger's Notebook

NASA unplugs last of IBM mainframes

Here's a blast from the past. Many folks in Rochester are familiar, some intimately, with IBM's System 360 mainframe.

It was the precursor to the wildly popular Rochester creation - the AS/400.

Here's some from a piece written by Stephen Shankman for CNET's news site about the end of an era.

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There was a time when IBM's mainframes were cutting-edge machines for scientific and engineering calculations.

Those days began in the 1960s, when IBM's System 360 rewrote the rules of computing and before humans walked on the moon. Big Blue long since has moved its high performance commupting effoprt toward its high-end Blue Gene systems and more conventional Linux servers using Intel and AMD x86 chips and Unix servers with its own Power processor. 

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Now NASA has followed suit, switching off its last mainframe, Chief Information Officer Linda Cureton said in a blog post Saturday.

"This month marks the end of an era in NASA computing. Marshall Space Flight Center powered down NASA's last mainframe, the IBM Z9 Mainframe," Cureton said.

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Cureton, who once programmed a System 360 mainframe in assembly language at the Goddard Space Flight Center, came to their defense:

They're really not so bad honestly, and they have their place. Things like virtual machines, hypervisors, thin clients, and swapping are all old hat to the mainframe generation though they are new to the current generation of cyber youths...

Today, they are the size of a refrigerator but in the old days, they were the size of a Cape Cod. Even though NASA has shut down its last one, there is still a requirement for mainframe capability in many other organizations.

More than four decades ago, when NASA acquired two "super-speed System 360 Model 95 machines in 1968, IBM touted the machines' mathematical abilities.

"Both of NASA's Model 95s are handling space exploration problems which require unusually high computation speeds," IBM said. "The Model 95s are capable of computing 14-digit multiplications at a rate of over 330 million in a minute."

Remember the Colonial Inn in downtown Roch.?

OK, this is a completely random subject, but one of my automatic Web searches triggered this nostalgic moment.

A 1917 postcard depicting Rochester's former Colonial Inn hotel at 114 Second St. S.W. is for sale right now on eBay.

Yeah, I know EVERYTHING is for on eBay right now, but this just caught my attention.

Mayo Clinic bought the Colonial Inn for $1.4 million in 2001. The Colonial Inn House Cafe, a sort of informal Mayo Clinic smokers lounge and good place for breakfast in the basement of the inn, closed Dec. 12, 2002.

Then the hotel was demolished in 2007. It is currently a Mayo parking lot.

Another notable point (to me personally) is that the postcard was mailed to Argus, Ind., a small town that was covered by a newspaper – The Sentinel – I worked for years ago.

The name of the Indiana city where The Sentinel newspaper is based?

Rochester.

OK, that ends Jeff's nostalgia session for the day and we return to our regularly scheduled business news and buzz.

Old name in antiques in a new city

A longtime Red Wing antique dealer recently move to a new home in Zumbrota.

Jeanne and Don Madtson, who have owned Memory Makers Antiques for the past six years, recently built a new almost 12,000-square-foot store and opened its doors in Zumbrota's industrial park in February.

Moving to Zumbrota from Red Wing meant loading an 18-foot trailer 22 times and a pickup 15 times to transport the furniture, Red Wing pottery and other other items.