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Mainframes continue to be used to this day. Minis were squeezed out. PCs will likely continue to be used. Eras don't end with a switch flipping. Things fade ou

Mainframes continue to be used to this day. Minis were squeezed out. PCs will likely continue to be used. Eras don't end with a switch flipping. Things fade out. PCs have started their fade as we move to mobile. We still have little idea what mobile will evolve into, but there is no question it and not PCs is what is evolving.

InclinedPlane 15y ago
Mainframes were replaced by PCs scaled up to mainframe levels, the old mainframe lines died off. That will probably happen to some degree with mobile and PCs as well. Laptops in the future will be more like tablets with keyboards than like the laptops of today, for example. And desktop OSes may have as much heritage from mobile OSes today as from stock OS/X and Windows today.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  > Mainframes were replaced by PCs scaled up to mainframe levels At the same time, mainframes moved on, acquiring new features PC-based servers cannot yet replicate. You'll never get the 5 nines a zSeries gives you out of a Dell. Or an xSeries IBM box. It's an incredibly sophisticated stack that goes from the user-facing applications and how you design them down to the processor microcode and processor cores dedicated to hardware management functions.