1. Forum
  2. Usenet
  3. COMP.SYS.UNISYS

  • Re: How many Unisys mainframe customers are still arround?

    From john smith@21:1/5 to All on Sun Dec 19 12:20:56 2021
    On Friday, February 6, 2015 at 4:35:15 AM UTC-8, Hans Jürgen> It seems to be a well hidden secret how many mainframe sites are still arround, especially those that run Unisys MCP or OS/2200 mainframes.

    This is an old thread which I just stumbled on but made me laugh. I think it was 2006 or 2007 when someone at unisys was asking the same question. This was just before I got redundant. Anyway, a guy in my group, can't remember his name, was supposed
    to survey mcp customers and report back. We had an all hands to hear the report which was surprising because it was pretty downbeat. As I remember, we had less than 100 spending 5-10 mill per year, and another 100 mostly smaller customers. It was
    pretty shocking but it also made sense. Doesn't answer your question I know but my guess would be about 200<. IBM though is still making money with it's z-series. Even where I live, I know several businesses with z-series.

    Mgmt would never tell us who we were working on software for. The only way you could tell the number of users was by the bug reports. But for sure, most projects had 0 customers. I worked there for a couple of decades and I can't remember any project
    except maybe 1 or 2 that ever had any customers. My guess was that they developed these projects and then bundled them in the build to make it look like we were relevant. Microsoft, apple, they do it too. But, as the revenue dropped, everything went
    overseas mostly. So another way to tell is to look for clearpath mcp support, either programming or admin services. Mostly you will find only jobs on the unisys website. The company adverts for jobs for mcp programmers but they've done that for
    decades. They're not real jobs however. The company has no intent to fill those jobs. The reason why they have these adverts is to tell anyone asking that they try to find workers but can't.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Andrew@21:1/5 to john smith on Sun Dec 19 22:19:18 2021
    john smith wrote:
    On Friday, February 6, 2015 at 4:35:15 AM UTC-8, Hans Jürgen> It seems to be a well hidden secret how many mainframe sites are still arround, especially those that run Unisys MCP or OS/2200 mainframes.

    This is an old thread which I just stumbled on but made me laugh. I think it was 2006 or 2007 when someone at unisys was asking the same question. This was just before I got redundant. Anyway, a guy in my group, can't remember his name, was supposed
    to survey mcp customers and report back. We had an all hands to hear the report which was surprising because it was pretty downbeat. As I remember, we had less than 100 spending 5-10 mill per year, and another 100 mostly smaller customers. It was
    pretty shocking but it also made sense. Doesn't answer your question I know but my guess would be about 200<. IBM though is still making money with it's z-series. Even where I live, I know several businesses with z-series.

    Mgmt would never tell us who we were working on software for. The only way you could tell the number of users was by the bug reports. But for sure, most projects had 0 customers. I worked there for a couple of decades and I can't remember any
    project except maybe 1 or 2 that ever had any customers. My guess was that they developed these projects and then bundled them in the build to make it look like we were relevant. Microsoft, apple, they do it too. But, as the revenue dropped,
    everything went overseas mostly. So another way to tell is to look for clearpath mcp support, either programming or admin services. Mostly you will find only jobs on the unisys website. The company adverts for jobs for mcp programmers but they've done
    that for decades. They're not real jobs however. The company has no intent to fill those jobs. The reason why they have these adverts is to tell anyone asking that they try to find workers but can't.


    I saw the list of OS2200 machines in Europe some time in Summer 2018,
    but a large proportion of them were small, older machines where the keys
    would have expired a couple of years before. Maybe the list was global
    but all I cared about were the European ones.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)