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Re: Any subscribers to this ng left?

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On 10/18/2025 4:27 PM, bill wrote:
> On 10/17/2025 10:51 AM, Scott Lurndal wrote:
>> Crash <nogood@dontbother.invalid> writes:
>>> On Fri, 17 Oct 2025 01:56:15 GMT, scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal)
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> BobRahe <BobRahe@icloud.com> writes:
>>>>> On 10/16/25 9:17 PM, Crash wrote:
>>>>>> Just wondering - I have not seen a post in months.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>> Yep, but me neither....
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> One might wonder if there is anything left to discuss
>>>> other than history...  And most of us veterans of the
>>>> big B or Sperry are not getting any younger.
>>>
>>> Looking at the current Unisys website there is still mention of
>>> Clearpath Forward and AB Site (was Enterprise Application Environment,
>>> was LINC) but it is well buried.
>>>
>>> I was wondering whether there were still mainframes (MCP and OS2200)
>>> still being sold.  I am from the MCP (Burroughs) heritage.
>>
>> Both V-series and A-series can be considered MCP.   The last V-series
>> was decomissioned circa 2010.   I believe that there are still
>> A-Series (Clearpath Libra) systems running, albeit in emulation on
>> Intel hardware.   Likewise the Univac descendents.
>>
>>
> 
> Also being old, decrepit and retired I have no first hand knowledge
> but I knew two Unisys users who's use dated back to 1100 and Exec8
> who are probably still running it.  As a matter of fact I would not
> be surprised if one of them was still running some of my code.
> (although I will probably never know because they are not likely to
> reveal anything about their operation!!)
> 
> The other one has tried "modernization" but as of the last time I
> heard anything about it, it was not going to happen and was considered
> somewhat impossible.  :-)
> 
> 
> bill
> 

Both the ClearPath MCP and OS2200 systems are still being sold and 
supported (well, after a fashion), but I suspect it's entirely a 
replacement market at this point.

It's true that Unisys stopped making their own hardware, probably a 
decade ago now, and everything runs on Intel processors. If you buy 
hardware from Unisys now, it's standard Dell server boxes. While that's 
a little sad, it simply got too expensive to design custom chips for the 
size of the market, so Unisys effectively replaced their custom 
microengines with a COTS microengine. After some creative re-engineering 
of the firmware, they get quite impressive performance.

In addition to buying complete systems from Unisys, you can now license 
just the firmware and system software and run it on your hardware, 
either bare metal or virtualized under one of a couple of hypervisors. 
You can also run it in the cloud, I think at least under AWS and Azure.

I believe that all of the remaining customers are facing big, difficult, 
expensive, risky migrations, and most probably have had five-year 
replacement plans in place for the last 20 years.

Paul

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Thread

Any subscribers to this ng left? Crash <nogood@dontbother.invalid> - 2025-10-17 14:17 +1300
  Re: Any subscribers to this ng left? BobRahe <BobRahe@icloud.com> - 2025-10-16 21:29 -0400
    Re: Any subscribers to this ng left? scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) - 2025-10-17 01:56 +0000
      Re: Any subscribers to this ng left? Crash <nogood@dontbother.invalid> - 2025-10-17 16:27 +1300
        Re: Any subscribers to this ng left? scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) - 2025-10-17 14:51 +0000
          Re: Any subscribers to this ng left? bill <bill.gunshannon@gmail.com> - 2025-10-18 19:27 -0400
            Re: Any subscribers to this ng left? Paul Kimpel <paul.kimpel@digm.com> - 2025-10-20 07:47 -0700
  Re: Any subscribers to this ng left? Don Vito Martinelli <hyperspace.flyover@vogon.gov.invalid> - 2025-10-17 20:33 +0200
  Re: Any subscribers to this ng left? Al Kossow <aek@bitsavers.org> - 2025-10-18 17:29 -0700

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