NASA disabled last mainframe

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has completely eliminated the legacy of the past. On February 11, a photo was published in the CIO blog, as an employee of the IT department disconnects the IBM Z9, the latest mainframe company.

For young readers of the blog, NASA’s technology director explained what the mainframe is. She says that at the time of her youth she began work as a system programmer on the IBM 360-95, wrote in an IBM 360 assembler, and still remembers green cards that contained all the necessary instructions for the assembler.

The photograph of 1968 shows the computing room at the Center for Space Flight. J. Marshall.
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Solving complex computational problems for space missions on those machines — with film reels and punched cards — was great. Well, now is the time for virtualization and distributed systems. Even for NASA, it became more profitable to rent supercomputers than to keep your own data center.