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The Future of Big Iron: An Interview with IBM’s Christian Jacobi

(morethanmoore.substack.com)
75 points rbanffy | 2 comments | 15 Oct 24 09:13 UTC | HN request time: 0.404s | source
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RcouF1uZ4gsC ◴[15 Oct 24 22:49 UTC] No.41853919[source]▶
Honestly mainframes sound like what on-premise aims for. You get uptime and proactive maintenance and stuff just runs. Yet the machine is on your premise and the data belongs to you.
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1. Spooky23 ◴[16 Oct 24 02:20 UTC] No.41855015[source]▶
The magic were the old minicomputers.

My wife ran a billing system that was a Motorola based AS/400. It was purchased in 1989/90. An ibm CE would drop by and swap parts every now and again when the computer phoned home.

They retired it in 2013, when a key part for the printer was no longer available.

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2. tonyedgecombe ◴[16 Oct 24 09:19 UTC] No.41857116[source]▶
There used to be a number of vendors selling boxes to connect mass market printers to IBM mid-range and mainframe systems. Axis was the one I worked with but there were many others.

I think they had all moved on or disappeared by 2013 though.