BeginnerPlatform26 min
What is a mainframe?
Start here. What the machine actually is, why banks and insurers still run on it, and the two shapes almost all mainframe work takes.
What you will be able to do
- Explain in one sentence what a mainframe is, without using the word 'big'
- Name the layers between the metal and a running program
- Tell batch work and online work apart on sight
Lessons
- What a mainframe actually isA mainframe is a computer built for one job above all others: doing an enormous number of small, boring, business-critical transactions per second without ever being wrong and…
- Why organisations still run themNobody keeps a mainframe out of nostalgia. They keep it because the cost, risk and time of moving forty years of accumulated business rules somewhere else is enormous, and…
- The stack, from metal to your programBetween the physical machine and the COBOL program you will eventually write, there are about five layers. Knowing their names makes almost every other conversation on this…
- Batch and online: the two shapes of workNearly everything on a mainframe is either a batch job (submit it, walk away, read the output later) or an online transaction (a person or system asks, and gets an answer in…
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