7 ms·
If nobody but a business can afford a computing platform, it is doomed long-term. Everything was on mainframes until PCS were good enough and now 'everything' i
by Multicomp 6y ago
If nobody but a business can afford a computing platform, it is doomed long-term. Everything was on mainframes until PCS were good enough and now 'everything' is on a PC, on prem or in the cloud. Even the serverless things are run on someone's PC somewhere. With the exception of the bleeding edge of high-speed computing with large amounts of data or old legacy banks that couldn't support a 10 character password if their lives depended on it, x86 or amd64 rule the world.
IBM does not get to boss us around anymore with their industry-specific terms that they refuse to use standard industry jargon instead.
> have you ever tried to run a Windows 3 app on Windows 10
Yes. It is called cardfile and it runs fine even though Windows 10 tries its best to never work on anything that isn't a telemetry laid in uwp social sharing app. No expensive mainframe needed.
(Windows experts will note that card file has 32-bit versions and not just 16-bit versions but hop back even one version of Windows and it can run 16-bit stuff as well so well my example wasn't perfect my point stands)
- akersten 6y agoYep. The article is pretty comical too - somehow, being able to write a C or Java app that runs on the mainframe, and having mobile access to the mainframe terminal, means that the platform is modern!
- _jal 6y agoReads like a book report written by someone who was trying but eventually conceded to an utter lack of interest.
- lol768 6y ago> Everything was on mainframes until PCS were good enough and now 'everything' is on a PC, on prem or in the cloud 100% agree with this - as a business, why would you want to pay the IBM support contract costs? As a developer, why would you want to waste your time learning about this sort of tech (I can't think of a more risky ecosystem to invest your time into learning in terms of chance of the skillset becoming obsolete)? I've yet to hear about any legitimate usecases that couldn't be accomplished using x86/amd64 VMs/machines. Monzo has clearly shown it's not required in banking (and frankly, have shown how slow and generally useless the other legacy banks have been when it comes to innovating on top of these mainframe-based platforms).
- DaiPlusPlus 6y agoI'm glad other people are aware of Monzo - I'm really looking forward to their deployment in North America. I can't wait to start programming my bank account and not have to have my bank mislead me about what "Bill pay" is (their online banking site won't tell me if a payment was sent through ACH or if it was a physically mailed cheque, wtf!)
- collyw 6y ago> As a developer, why would you want to waste your time learning about this sort of tech Because you want to avoid the churn associated with modern development?
- Multicomp 6y agoI had to come back to reply to this because I also agree that modern development has way too much churn. You can choose boring technology like a sqlite backend accessed over the web via PHP and cgi without needing to learn an entirely different paradigm like the shift required for learning mainframes.
- closeparen 6y agoAlmost all of what cloud providers offer can be accomplished using plain old VMs, yet people find it useful to pay for higher-level abstractions. The whole serverless thing is arguably a return to the mainframe model: managed black-box platform that takes care of replication, failover, storage, etc. and lets you write code that's relatively naive about distributed systems. A mainframe is just a distributed system in a box, presenting similarly simplified APIs.
- jlgaddis 6y ago> As a developer, why would you want to waste your time learning about this sort of tech (I can't think of a more risky ecosystem to invest your time into learning in terms of chance of the skillset becoming obsolete)? You realize that mainframes aren't just for running 40-year-old COBOL applications, right? Pretty much any code you might write, including that written in the hippest, trendiest, fad-of-the-week language, will run on top of this "risky ecosystem".
- hinkley 6y agoIf we are going to think of history as a wheel and try to learn from that history, I think you have to factor minicomputers into your timeline. There were a gateway to PCs, which lead to laptops and smart phones. Administratively, you could argue that AWS is a time-shared mainframe. Or, perhaps, a time-share company in possession of a handful of mainframes. That opens the door for IBM to walk through and claim that they were here the whole time. Frankly, I'm not sure we want to be there, for reasons you already referenced. My suspicion and, dare I say, proposal, is that Brian Cantrell's group is currently trying to reinvent the mini computer with open source software and 95% COTS hardware.
- p1esk 6y agoWith the exception of the bleeding edge of high-speed computing with large amounts of data That’s a pretty big exception, don’t you think? BTW, Nvidia sells mainframes: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/dgx-saturnv/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/dgx-saturnv/
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoNot really; everyone thinks that they're big data and high performance computing, but most of the time they really aren't.
- Guest42 6y agoIn my experience the data just seems bigger for organizations when the proper hardware, software, and coding practices aren’t used.
- p1esk 6y agoThese guys [1] trained a model to generate music. Used 512 GPU cluster for 4 weeks. Dataset is one million songs. Now imagine what would it take to generate video. 10 years from now everyone will want to generate something. [1] https://openai.com/blog/jukebox https://openai.com/blog/jukebox
- Guest42 6y agoGoodness, I worked at a startup that burned through 200k worth of cloud credits pretty fast but that’s amazing
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- TeMPOraL 6y agoI think the data should be measured in units of time. Like, how long it takes your software to touch every entry just once. This explains how the same amount of data may be peanuts or Big Data worthy of a Hadoop cluster, depending on how bloated and wasteful your software is.
- unethical_ban 6y agoI had a nice, intellectual post dismembering you for attacking Win10 and its backwards compatibility, but you called yourself out in the end. Read the whole comment, I guess.
- golergka 6y ago> If nobody but a business And quite big business at that. Everybody starts their tiny startup with AWS and Heroku, because it literally costs nothing - and if you eventually scale up, you won't switch stacks in a such a radical way.
- pjc50 6y agoIndeed. The binary portability of Windows is tremendous, and the source portability goes even further: at my previous job we built the same MFC codebase to run on a tiny obsolete WinCE4 device that also ran on developer's desktops under Windows 10. Mainframe will continue to be obscure until there is a downscaled option. The Z-series equivalent of Raspberry Pi.