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Even as a different perspective to that - a lot of what AWS/GCP/Azure are doing today, IBM was doing in the 80's with Cobol and DB2 and a bunch of tech that peo

Even as a different perspective to that - a lot of what AWS/GCP/Azure are doing today, IBM was doing in the 80's with Cobol and DB2 and a bunch of tech that people today are just not interested in. There's a post that I saw on HN a couple weeks ago[1] talking about what an AWS Lambda service would look like in Cobol and I was blown away. This is the stuff my dad used to work on when he was fresh out of college, and I'm not exactly a spring chicken (as evidenced by the fact that I used the phrase "spring chicken")! 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25989454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25989454, link to article submitted for the lazy: https://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=18156250&cid=61014218 https://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=18156250&cid...

908B64B197 6y ago
The problem was, undergrads in top 50 CS programs were not using IBM mainframes during the 80's. They were using UNIX. Same thing today (and a few PC here and there). Getting access to a mainframe was and still is very expensive. That's why Google, Facebook, everyone post 2000 basically got started on commodity hardware. Because it's cheap, it's what the founders knew and it works. It's also what the top 50 alumni know, and there's no vendor lock-in.