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84 points rbanffy | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.203s | source
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froh ◴[] No.41852945[source]
Jacobi is one of 70 IBM Fellows (think IBM internal professors, free reign over a research budget, you gain the title with technical prowess plus business acumen)

at the heart of the Mainframe success is this:

> I’d say high-availability and resiliency means many things, but in particular, two things. It means you have to catch any error that happens in the system - either because a transistor breaks down due to wear over the lifetime, or you get particle injections, or whatever can happen. You detect the stuff and then you have mechanisms to recover. You can't just add this on top after the design is done, you have to be really thinking about it from the get-go.

and then he goes into details how that is achieved. the article nicely goes into some details.

oh and combine the 99.9999999% availability "nine nines" with insane throughput. as in real time phone wiretapping throughput, or real time mass financial transactions, of course.

or a web server for an online image service.

or "your personal web server in a mouse click", sharing 10.000 such virtual machines on a single physical machine. which has a shared read only /ist partition mounted into all guests. not containers, no, virtual machines, in ca 2006...

"don't trust a computer you can lift"

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1. bitsandboots ◴[] No.41878681[source]
The heart of the mainframe success was being first to make a real OS and real forward compatibility.

The heart of the mainframe's continued existence is as you say, combined with risk aversion to changing software that currently works, and a lack of people who understands how it even works to know how to change it.

But the heart of the mainframe's failure to expand is IBM's reluctance to join the modern world in pricing and availability.

There is no simple way to become a mainframe dev because there is no simple way to get access to modern zOS. There is an entry fee. And it's hard to be excited about anything they do to the silicon when you know that you don't just buy the system, you're charged for consumption as if it were a cloud device. So, nobody with a wallet wants to run anything other than the essentials there, hence the platform never grows.