Yeah i have the impression That until the 386 or so happened, most mainframe people scoffed at "micros" as toys that could never be used for much more than beep

Yeah i have the impression That until the 386 or so happened, most mainframe people scoffed at "micros" as toys that could never be used for much more than beeps and all caps text. This, sadly, seems to have resulted in the "micro" people reinventing much of what was already being done on mainframes and hailing it as grand discoveries. And i worry that we are seeing something similar going on now with smartphones (never mind that i feel the introduction of the iPhone basically rolled back the development of smartphones by a decade, as companies dropped what they were already doing to scramble after the "shiny").