Buffy The Vampire Slayer

The mainframe is dead. Long live the mainframe. While it has had a stake in its heart as often as the Dracula of movies, the mainframe - like the Transylvanian vampire - continues to live on and on. I’m not trying to create a negative connotation here, but it is true.

Like Vampire movies, the mainframe continues to thrive. In the first quarter of this year, the mainframe was primarily responsible for a 10 percent increase in hardware sales at IBM. So any rumors of its death are - to say the least - premature.

That doesn’t mean the data center is the same as it once was. The old style data center of 50s movies - run by bristle-haired flattop nerds in short sleeve white shirts and skinny ties - has been replaced with a data center run by former Webmasters who don’t know how to tie a tie.

Most of the early mainframe workers have retired or are about to get their ticket out of the glass house. This new mainframe worker though, has grown up in the fast-paced, new-product-a-day, the-answer-is-on-the-Internet, world of the PC.

That is why, when Computer Associates decided to revamp its CA-Unicenter line, it faced a reality check. The new employees who would be using Unicenter wouldn’t know a punch card from an 8-track tape. So, according to David Hodgson, senior vice president of mainframe system product development at CA, its new CA-Unicenter products will be much more like PC products. "That’s who will be using the products, so now we have to make products that have features they are used to. We’ve had to change our mindset a bit," he said last week.

To continue my analogy - Doddering old Dr. Van Helsing has been replaced by Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I wouldn’t expect the new products to be more like Doom and less like, say, Excel. But who knows? Imagine the kind of graphics you could run from a mainframe. As today’s data center employee might say, "Cool, dude."