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Celebrating 30 years of mainframe support
By Martin English | May 19, 2009
You may know that CSC hit the big 50 this year. A local 30 year milestone has been reached as well.
In 1978 the Port Kembla steelworks (then called Australian Iron and Steel or AIS, now owned by Bluescope Steel and supported by CSC Asustralia) received a water cooled IBM 3032 mainframe with 4M of memory, a replacement for it’s existing CDC machines. One of the first things written for the IBM was an application “development/runtime environment” called STANDFAST. It provided a standard way to use IMS for the application programmer and a standard “look and feel” for customers. All on-line IMS applications developed on the mainframe for AIS used STANDFAST.
According to the internal documentation the first programs were written in May 1979 or 30 years ago this month and they are still going strong.
BHP, then owner of the Steel Works, outsourced computer services to CSC in 2000. Later on, BHP divested itself of what became Bluescope Steel. However, support for the mainframes (and their applications) remained with CSC.
The upshot is a 30 year old application, still being supported by some of the original implementers.
Topics: Australia, History, Productivity, Technology | No Comments »
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