The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives

i don't get a chance to say this often so i'll say it 😁... my first email account was on an mvs machine. i'd telnet in from my dorm and read it with mail or elm. if i wanted a printout i'd have to walk to the computer science department to pick it up. find it laid out in a rack of shelves with other people's printouts. it was on the grayest, most dirt cheapest continuous feed paper. good times

I work in a mainframe as part of my daily job. It’s one of my favorite things. Intensely powerful, can shuffle through thousands of records of data in an instant.

It’s expensive to run, and likely could be replaced with a modern application… but that high availability, high parallelism, and ‘built-in’ handling of resource scheduling to avoid deadlocks and other multitasking worries is hard to beat.

There’s a reason it’s stuck around. And while it’s annoyingly proprietary and in most cases still means you’re in the green screen terminals, it’s just a powerful tool.