Mainframes drive strong Q2 for Unisys

Suddenly, it is feeling a bit like the post-recessional early 1990s, at least in MainframeLand. Mainframe maker Unisys reported its financial results for the second quarter this morning, before the market opened on Wall Street. Thanks to booming sales of its profitable ClearPath mainframes, the company booked $59.4m in net …

[Stevie]

Bah!

Unisys Clearpath running OS2200 on the 2200 node: It is the Rolls-Royce of computers. Elegant, secure, trustworthy. It is the mainframe that Harrod's would sell to one.

Early in my IT life I was forcibly indoctrinated to then Sperry 1100 series computers, and never looked back. In the 1990s an IBM DBA asked me if we had a disc failure during the online day how much data would be lost after recovery, and I didn't understand the question. Didn't all mainframe computers offer step recovery that made such events a simple matter of replacing the hardware and typing "RECOVER TO NOW"?

You know, if you bought an airline ticket anywhere in the world in the early 90s, there was a better than 85% chance that your transaction was passed through Unisys hardware and software somewhere along the route.

Wonderful hardware, great OS, robust software that worked (if you didn't count their execrable RDBMS engine: SQL 2.0 compliant my left buttock). Them were the days.

Yoked to Unisys's legendary zero powers of strategic vision and nil marketing accumen, how could they fail?

[John Smith 19]

@Stevie

"Wonderful hardware, great OS, robust software that worked (if you didn't count their execrable RDBMS engine: SQL 2.0 compliant my left buttock). Them were the days.

Yoked to Unisys's legendary zero powers of strategic vision and nil marketing accumen, how could they fail?"

You *almost* make them sound the American ICL.

However *unlike* ICL they are still in the mainframe mfg game and make a profit (albeit a fairly modest one given that turnover).