4 ms·

Everything old is new again. In the 50's and 60's, computers were so expensive that most organizations leased computer time.

• rsynnott 5y ago
  And those organisations who _did_ own their own computers in the 60s and 70s often had to make this sort of in-chip-purchase. I gather that, on payment of a very large amount of money, IBM would send out an engineer to change some jumpers to remove artificial limits on some s360-era machines.
• baq 5y ago
  nowadays, computers are so cheap that most organizations lease computer time...
  • qayxc 5y ago
    That's due to a reversal - in the 60's and 70's the iron was expensive and labour was cheap. Today it's the other way around and most organisations don't lease the actual iron, they lease the infrastructure around it - turnkey software solutions, maintenance, scaling, (physical-)security, asset management, etc. - the works. Sure, you could buy a couple of servers for cheap and even including annual upkeep they'd be cheaper than your AWS, GCP, or Azure package. Problem is that you now need an administrator who doesn't have enough work to be a fulltime employee, likely a developer, who also doesn't have enough work to justify a fulltime position, and worst of all your machines are running idle 90% of the time and still the order system collapses when your annual big sale starts... In other words, hardware costs are only part of the equation and it can make a lot of sense to outsource this component.
• qayxc 5y ago
  Old? I worked with IBM mainframes just a couple of years ago (mid 2010s) and that's still their business model. Need more processing power for your quarterly reports and annual stocktacking? No problem, give them a call and they'll unlock additional resources for a time (and a fee, but that goes without saying).