NASA has shut down its last mainframe computer earlier this month, marking an end of an era for the US space agency’s computing, NASA CIO Linda Cureton wrote in a blog post.

The agency’s last operating mainframe, an IBM z9, was its Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, where the agency does a lot of its spacecraft development and testing. At NASA – as in a lot of private enterprises – mainframes, very powerful and expensive computers, have been replaced with server clusters.

In fact, Cureton’s first job at NASA was to program mainframe systems at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “That IBM 360-95 was used to solve complex computational problems for space flight,” Cureton wrote. 

“Back then, I comfortably navigated the world of IBM 360 Assembler language and still remember the much-coveted ‘green card’ that had all the pearls of information about machine code.  Back then, real systems programmers did hexadecimal arithmetic – today, ‘there’s an app for it!’.”

NASA’s entire IT infrastructure is currently in the midst of an agency-wide overhaul, as it attempts to comply with the White House’s data center consolidation program across the entire federal government.

The agency has moved away from its previous plan to build a single consolidated data center that would provide services to the agency’s employees around the country. Its strategy now is to build out a set of regional data centers, tackling the consolidation effort at the regional level instead of doing it at the overall agency level.