A mainframe style system is a couple of things that the x86 ecosystem is only recently started to get. Some of these (not every "mainframe" had every feature i

A mainframe style system is a couple of things that the x86 ecosystem is only recently started to get. Some of these (not every "mainframe" had every feature in this list) * nested virtualization -- anything can run inside anything inception style (IBM; maybe others) * smart peripherals -- hey storage get me this record! hey terminal send me the whole message when the user's done typing it out! (most of them) * binary abstraction -- your code is compiled by a bytecode of some sort that's dragged along to abstract decades of underlying hardware changes (IBM, burroughs, probably others) I think there's a bunch of stuff that's unique to unix that people just presume "this is the way" but since I'm mostly stuck in that universe I can't give a quick overview of all the wonky things that are totally alien to unix but totally normal to other systems.