On 8/14/23 9:55 AM, Bob Bridges wrote:
If we're limiting the count to on-line in-house users - I'm talking about TSO, CICS etc - I suspect State Farm might have a thousand users logged on at a time (that's a massive system) but a few hundred is more usual in the companies I've worked for.
State Farm is one of the biggest install bases that I'm aware of. But I question how many (emulated) terminals were actually connected to the mainframe.
I know that in the late '80s / early '90s State Farm had dumb terminals on many people's desks. But there were also a lot of PCs running terminal emulation.
What I don't know is how many of those terminals were logged into the mainframe vs an AS/400.
I have a family member who was my visibility into the State Farm Regional Offices in the '80s and '90s before becoming an agent in the late '90s / early '00s.
I know for a fact that in their office as an agent that their dumb terminals and terminal emulators were connected to the in office AS/400 and that they could do much of, if not all of, the day to day things on the AS/400 even if the WAN connection to the mainframe in the R.O. was disconnected. They would run into problems if the link to the R.O. was down overnight as part of batched operations. But day to day things worked perfectly fine disconnected from the R.O.
I would consider these users to be logged into the local AS/400 and /not/ logged into the mainframe.
Similarly, it's my understanding that State Farm has rows of AS/400s in the R.O. that were used to front end the terminals in the R.O.
I count people that spend any amount of time interacting with the system directly, be it a TSO READY prompt, or ISPF, or something with VM, et al. But I don't count things that connect to a front end that make back end calls to the mainframe as being logged into the mainframe.
Currently I have an insurance company as my main client; in-house there are about 220 managers who review access, with let's guess an average of five mainframe reports each. They also have about 400 independent agents that use a system that ultimately connects them to the mainframe, and each of those may have one or two assistants with their own IDs. That's probably typical for an insurance company.
If you can, please elaborate if those users can function for most of their job if the mainframe is inaccessible do to Backhoe Bob chewing on WAN connections again?
I couldn't guess about how many might be logged on at once. Oh, sure I could, but it's just a guess: If there are 2000 mainframe IDs, maybe 500 at a time? Purest guess.
Do you have any idea how many of those are /active/ vs /idle/ logged in users?
But we've also been talking about banks and their ATMs. Do we count ATM customers in the number for Bank of America, with their branches around the country? That could run to thousands at one time, don't you think?
As alluded to above, the ATM patrons aren't /mainframe/ users themselves. Rather the ATM /may/ be a mainframe user. But I've seen ATMs for banks that have absolutely nothing to do with a mainframe. IMHO ATM != mainframe. Sure, it suggests, but it doesn't guarantee.
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