You're exactly right. I worked on a mainframe for a major Bay Area school district during and shortly after high school, as a computer operator and COBOL progr

You're exactly right. I worked on a mainframe for a major Bay Area school district during and shortly after high school, as a computer operator and COBOL programmer. I was there for a couple of years; rebooting the mainframe was unheard-of. It never seemed to develop memory leaks, it didn't get more quirky after it had been running for a long time. Since it wasn't accessible to the internet (or even most of the network), it didn't need to have any time spent on it trying to secure it against the latest Windows bug. It never required software updates, other than the ones that we coded ourselves and deployed without having to reboot anything. The database didn't fall over when we ran a payroll job or report cards. But, best of all -- and I love telling this story, because I think it really illustrates something that the techs using all the modern stuff just don't "get" -- it had the best recovery systems I have ever seen, hands down. So, one day there was a power outage. We had backup power systems, but like a lot of data processing departments we were just a couple of overworked people and they hadn't been checked in a while. They didn't last as long as we were expecting and the mainframe kicks off. Around that time, I'd been playing around with Linux and such, and I had some idea of just how ugly things got when a complex operating system powered off in the middle of doing things. I was a little bit stressed out. The other guy, a clean-shaven greybeard, wasn't. When the power came back on, the mainframe booted up -- quickly -- and resumed its operations from pretty much the exact point at which the power had gone out. It didn't miss a beat, none of the data it produced was erroneous. That was in '98 or thereabouts. To say that mainframes are more reliable than the popular alternatives is an understatement. :-)