<story><title>On the strange joys of mainframe OSes that have survived into modern times</title><url>https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/86995.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bhauer</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;A handful of grumpy old gits know that if you pick the right languages, and the right tools, you can build something to replace this 2nd level system in the same types of tools as the first level system, and that you don’t need all the fancy scaling infrastructure because one modern box can support a million concurrent users no problem, and a few such boxes can support tens of hundreds of millions of them, all in something in the corner of one room, with an uptime of decades and no need for any cloud.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I suppose I am a grumpy old git, then, although I did not think of myself that way until recently. In the past decade or two, I&amp;#x27;ve seen computer science lose its collective appreciation of the staggering potential of hardware. This has steadily resulted in software being built with tremendously over-engineered, hyper-complicated, cloud-first architectures that barely match the throughput of a single box running a high-performance platform (and for the record, &amp;quot;high performance&amp;quot; can still be relatively ergonomic via Java, C#, Rust, and so on).&lt;p&gt;The scale of hardware, clock cycles, bits per second of bandwidth, etc., being squandered on modern cloud-first highly complicated architectures boggles the mind.&lt;p&gt;I fear there is no strength behind any pendulum swing back to architectural simplicity, appreciation of the available capacity of hardware and how to use it, and local-first.</text></comment>
<story><title>On the strange joys of mainframe OSes that have survived into modern times</title><url>https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/86995.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>magic_hamster</author><text>This actually got me fairly curious as to what the big difference is between mainframes and regular ol&amp;#x27; micros. I don&amp;#x27;t think I ever used a proper mainframe, and I honestly wanted to know more. The author keeps building up to this massively different, otherworldly system, and then just finishes without ever answering.&lt;p&gt;I did feel some contempt towards certain developers (who dare call themselves software engineers) and there was definitely an &amp;quot;old man yelling at cloud&amp;quot; undercurrent. If only I could learn something of merit, that would have been worth it.&lt;p&gt;So I guess it&amp;#x27;s up to us plebs to go and see what makes mainframes so different. How the &amp;quot;weird&amp;quot; custom architectures work. What&amp;#x27;s it like to work on one and write code for it.</text></comment>