On Nov 9, 2007, at 2:49 AM, Timothy Sipples wrote:
At least most ATMs are still connected to mainframes. Aren't they?
....
Most I dealt with in the mid-1980s were Tandem NonStop.
It's an interesting bit of history that the first Tandem machine
wasn't
available until 1976, well after the first electronic ATM (1967)
and lots
of other ATMs. From what I've read the first networked ATM
appeared in
1968, and the first "popular" ATM (i.e. same model placed into
service by
more than one bank) was the IBM 2984 starting in 1973. The IBM 2984
offered variable cash withdrawals and instantly deducted from your
account,
so it was 100% on-line -- 34 years ago. (I remember my father
using our
local bank's first ATM, newly installed, when I was a young child. It
seemed like magic.) Presumably most if not all of these ATMs
connected to
IBM System/360s and /370s. Tandem came along after almost a decade of
ATMs.
But leaving aside possible "dumb boxes" in the middle, yes, some
ATMs are
still connected to HP NonStop (formerly Tandem) machines acting as
switches, thence to IBM mainframes. ACI Worldwide's BASE24-eps is
one very
popular ATM solution, for example.
A few years ago BASE24 became available for z/OS, so you can guess the
trend. (That and, I assume, the fact virtually all Western banks
now keep
z/OS and core transaction systems running 24x365. Tandem's raison
d'être,
to keep the ATMs up and queuing limited transactions during nightly or
weekly scheduled outage, no longer applies with modern 24 hour
SLAs. Think
CICS TS/CICSplex, DFSMStvs and others, DB2 data sharing, MQ shared
queues,
IMS HALDB/IMSplex, z/TPF, Sysplex, etc., etc.) Here's some technical
information:
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg247268.html
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/redp4337.html
And then there are Japanese ATMs, but that's a digression for
another time.
Timothy,
Thanks for the last entry. In the late 80's (early 90's?) we picked
up a Tandem at the insistence of management. It was put in the data
center and *NEVER* powered up it sat there like all good boat
anchors. I never heard who was responsible for the coming of the the
machine. It must have been high up though or I would have heard. At
the time were were CICS and had IDMS. A few years go by and CICS and
DB2 are there and are still there. Why they needed it was anybodies
guess. But I guess they had to spend money to show the brokerage
houses we were on the spot. We had pretty good uptime, if there was
an "outage" it was a TP issue. I think (I could be wrong) they only
outage we had was an MVS crash and that was for 30 minutes. This was
over 10 years, I worked it out and it was in the 99.99999 range but I
guess that wasn't good enough. There might have been IDMS problems
that I never heard of so the numbers may have been different from the
above. The IDMS DBA's were quite secretive,
Ed
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