My father has worked for IBM, Airlines and Credit Card companies developing on their mainframes. I believe the the system is called z/TPF?
I can't recall any specific stats or stories right now but you can imagine the discussions between a father who develops primarily with Assembly and a son (me) who ended up being a .NET developer working on various startups. We've had a few talks about the 'cloud' mostly resulting in him laughing at what we call 'web scale'.
I had a number of mainframe mentors back in the 90s who taught me about TPF...
TPF is an OS, transaction processing & database system that was written in mainframe assembler and deployed in 1979 to run SABRE and a few other core transaction systems (VISA, AMEX, Marriott hotels, etc.) - maybe 100 customers still use it today - and it was a descendent of a previous assembler system developed in the 1960's.
It probably was (and is) the closest system to "web scale" through the 80's and 90s's in that it ran some of the highest volume workloads globally (e.g. 5000-10000+ tps back in the 80s / 90s, 25000+ tps today) at 99.99% availability. In context, Twitter hits 10-15k tweets per second during big sports events.
These days it's extremely expensive and slow to make changes to TPF relative to modern technology (as it traditionally required S/370 or S/390 assembler, though these days requires C). IBM has a newer version called z/TPF which makes it easier to code in C or C++ and communicate with the outside world via web services, etc.
Indeed it does seem like there are only a few companies that use this stuff. Like you said, you had to be a pretty big company with massive amounts of transactions to merit it. He's actually contracting with the IRS right working on some newer systems to handle your tax returns. (He tells me every year it's a miracle you get your tax returns every year on the old system)
Whenever he's looking for a new gig he basically has a set list of contacts he goes through. It seems like almost all the developers of these systems know each other.
Let me say that "web scale" to a startup is a different beast than "web scale" to big companies.
I remember being at a startup and being impressed that we were doing a million dynamic pages per hour. Then I got the chance to see a real system at a big company pumping out orders of magnitude more traffic than that per second. (I am not at liberty to share exact numbers.) And doing constant processing on that traffic.
I doubt your father would laugh at systems like that if he learned what they manage to handle.
Oh I'm sure! His examples usually revolved around his days working on credit card processing systems. But I can't even start to imagine the systems required to handle requests for VISA which can supply the needed response-time and up-time demands.
Stop and think about how much traffic you think that Google gets. Don't forget all of the AJAX requests that are sent back and forth, random ads on third party sites (many of whose pages auto-refresh while they are sitting in your browser, each time loading multiple ads), etc.
Let's just say that any semi-reasonable back of the envelope will give you some truly impressive numbers. I don't think that I should say any more than that.
Now consider that this data is constantly being processed to figure out things like click through rates, trending requests, and much, much more. And that data is then fed back into the live site.
The implied transaction rate should be enough to impress the average mainframe user.
Of course Google's scale is impressive but you're talking about datacenters upon datacenters of servers. I always get a chuckle when people talk about "old" mainframes taking up a whole datacenter. Now the Mainframe occupies a corner and the commodity servers take up the datacenter. :P
I can't recall any specific stats or stories right now but you can imagine the discussions between a father who develops primarily with Assembly and a son (me) who ended up being a .NET developer working on various startups. We've had a few talks about the 'cloud' mostly resulting in him laughing at what we call 'web scale'.