3 ms·

Hypervisors are all the rage today but that's so 1970s in the mainframe world. Welcome to the party, kids.

digi_owl 10y ago
Indeed. What I find most "puzzling" is the lack of acknowledgement of this in the business. Its like it is a whole new, almost magical, thing that the devs dreamed up. I wonder if it has to do with how the microcomputer world had to almost bootstrap itself without any input from the mainframe people, because the latter considered the micros little more than toys. And this continue into the present, as a large segment of the business is self taught. And by now even going to university will not expose you to mainframes, as they have largely been abandoned in favor of clusters.
- smacktoward 10y ago
  It's at least as much do with the industry's youth fetish; ideas that were common on mainframes are going to seem new and groundbreaking to you if you never work with anyone old enough to have used a mainframe. The tech industry has no mechanisms for developing institutional memory, so we are constantly reinventing old wheels instead of developing new ones.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Good point. It is hard to convince a 30-something to accept the "death sprint", compared to 20-somethings brought up LAN parties and red bull binging.
    - scrame 10y ago
      No, 30-somethings had those too, and moutain dew and what-not. The differences is that people in their 30s might have already spent their 20s doing "death springs" and are sick of it.
- sien 10y ago
  The people who actually develop hypervisors and the hardware to support virtualisation would read the journal articles and textbooks written by the people who developed hypervisors and such. People who developed noSQL databases would have looked at things like IMS when writing new systems presumably too. There's just mostly a disconnect with people who work developing applications and others on PCs and those who work on mainframes. At places where I've worked that had both PCs and mainframes there was default segregation between mainframe developers and maintainers and PC developers and users. Of a mainframe team of 20-30 people there seemed to be about 5 who were PC devs as well.
  - Cyph0n 10y ago
    You'd actually be surprised how often things like this get "rediscovered", even in academia. After all, we humans are forgetful creatures.

Indeed. What I find most "puzzling" is the lack of acknowledgement of this in the business. Its like it is a whole new, almost magical, thing that the devs dreamed up. I wonder if it has to do with how the microcomputer world had to almost bootstrap itself without any input from the mainframe people, because the latter considered the micros little more than toys. And this continue into the present, as a large segment of the business is self taught. And by now even going to university will not expose you to mainframes, as they have largely been abandoned in favor of clusters.

smacktoward 10y ago
It's at least as much do with the industry's youth fetish; ideas that were common on mainframes are going to seem new and groundbreaking to you if you never work with anyone old enough to have used a mainframe. The tech industry has no mechanisms for developing institutional memory, so we are constantly reinventing old wheels instead of developing new ones.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Good point. It is hard to convince a 30-something to accept the "death sprint", compared to 20-somethings brought up LAN parties and red bull binging.
  - scrame 10y ago
    No, 30-somethings had those too, and moutain dew and what-not. The differences is that people in their 30s might have already spent their 20s doing "death springs" and are sick of it.
sien 10y ago
The people who actually develop hypervisors and the hardware to support virtualisation would read the journal articles and textbooks written by the people who developed hypervisors and such. People who developed noSQL databases would have looked at things like IMS when writing new systems presumably too. There's just mostly a disconnect with people who work developing applications and others on PCs and those who work on mainframes. At places where I've worked that had both PCs and mainframes there was default segregation between mainframe developers and maintainers and PC developers and users. Of a mainframe team of 20-30 people there seemed to be about 5 who were PC devs as well.
- Cyph0n 10y ago
  You'd actually be surprised how often things like this get "rediscovered", even in academia. After all, we humans are forgetful creatures.