As i learn of the mainframes of yesterday it feels like all the hoopla of _nix on x86 these days is basically rediscovering all those things mainframes did back then...
Well, an original PC cost, what, $5K back in the day? A new 3081 370-compatible from the early 80s was multiple millions (can't find hard prices quickly, so guessing). I'll bet the CPU in the mainframe alone cost multiples of an entire XT. Mainframe engineers had a little more breathing room when making their design decisions.
So we can look at it one of two ways: those kids today, all excited about VMs and stuff we had in the 60s. Or, holy crap, I can do stuff on my phone that used to take a multi-million dollar mainframe.
Indeed. What I find most "puzzling" is the lack of acknowledgement of this in the business. Its like it is a whole new, almost magical, thing that the devs dreamed up.
I wonder if it has to do with how the microcomputer world had to almost bootstrap itself without any input from the mainframe people, because the latter considered the micros little more than toys.
And this continue into the present, as a large segment of the business is self taught. And by now even going to university will not expose you to mainframes, as they have largely been abandoned in favor of clusters.
It's at least as much do with the industry's youth fetish; ideas that were common on mainframes are going to seem new and groundbreaking to you if you never work with anyone old enough to have used a mainframe.
The tech industry has no mechanisms for developing institutional memory, so we are constantly reinventing old wheels instead of developing new ones.
No, 30-somethings had those too, and moutain dew and what-not. The differences is that people in their 30s might have already spent their 20s doing "death springs" and are sick of it.
The people who actually develop hypervisors and the hardware to support virtualisation would read the journal articles and textbooks written by the people who developed hypervisors and such.
People who developed noSQL databases would have looked at things like IMS when writing new systems presumably too.
There's just mostly a disconnect with people who work developing applications and others on PCs and those who work on mainframes.
At places where I've worked that had both PCs and mainframes there was default segregation between mainframe developers and maintainers and PC developers and users. Of a mainframe team of 20-30 people there seemed to be about 5 who were PC devs as well.
