It was a marketing war. IBM, Hitachi, NCR and other mainframe vendors vs Sun, HP, and later Microsoft and Oracle on the distributed computing side. As usual, it

It was a marketing war. IBM, Hitachi, NCR and other mainframe vendors vs Sun, HP, and later Microsoft and Oracle on the distributed computing side. As usual, it wasn't about whose tech was better: but who was going to get the customer's money. Back in the late 90s I saw IBM terminals doing some impressive graphics -- and that was just the built-in stuff for the UI. Build my career on distributed, first Sun and then Oracle on Red Hat, with all the FOSS in between like Apache and MySQL. But I'd take a 360 running Linux in an LPAR over any cluster of servers in a data center. AWS, for one, changed everything and has led to an explosion of alternatives. Can't imagine ever going back.