A some of you might or might not know, there is a tiny program that is being run on all the mainframes in the world. It’s called IEFBR14 and is one of the few programs I know with such a humongous “changes/lines of code”-metric.
This post is titled “The Smart Contract that doesn’t do anything...” so it must be about hip, modern Blockchains and not about old and dusty Mainframes.
And that’s where you’re wrong. This post is about Mainframes. About getting the word out that they’re *not* some 80s piece of hardware, but state-of-the-art technological monsters that can run on about 170 cores with a massive 32TB of memory. Mostly all is redundant and hot-swappable and a multi-site configuration is easily configured. It easily runs about 125K transactions per second and it even does Java. So why do keep bashing the Mainframe?
But back to Smart Contracts and the blockchain.
As of today you can ‘run’ IEFBR14 on the blockchain. This is done via a “smart contract” (that doesn’t do anything) deployed to the blockchain in block #5267182.
You can run the IEFBR14() function on this contract to run IEFBR14 on the blockchain. This will fire two events : IEF403I and IEF404I and will store your wallet address. Only the contract owner can send a call to the S222() function and this will kill the contract (I think). Feel free to send your 0.001 ETH with the Sponsor() function should you feel like it...
Because the blockchain is hip! So let’s see how many times we can run this IEFBR14 on the blockchain. Maybe some other Mainframe Idiot ™ will whip up a twitter agent to post events from the contract :)
I’m hoping this will bring a couple of smart cookies to start reading up on Mainframe Stuff. For those smart cookies interested, the the (original) program has it’s own wikipedia-page where you’ll learn that IEFBR14 could just as well be called IEFSVC3 but that’s something for another time...
