Since no one's mentioned it, this was tried once before by a company called Micro Focus, which sold software to modernize "legacy" COBOL-based mainframe applica

Since no one's mentioned it, this was tried once before by a company called Micro Focus, which sold software to modernize "legacy" COBOL-based mainframe applications so they could run on x86, and while somewhat successful, they failed to disrupt IBM's mainframe business, because these legacy systems traditionally relied as much on the idiosyncrasies of the mainframe hardware itself and not just the COBOL language. If all Anthropic is offering is some kind of smart language translation, I'm not sure they will have many takers. And whatever you think about mainframes, it is quite nice that our credit card networks work as efficiently and reliably as they do.