When I worked at Boeing (my first real job) I learned an awful lot from the older engineers. But when I switched to the software biz, older ones didn't exist and I had to pretty much learn everything the hard way.

I've noticed this also. I'm originally an EE, so during my first job the department was basically made up of a bunch of wizards from the days of Electronics magazine who all were in to HAM radio and custom guitar amps. I learnt a phenomenal amount in a short amount of time, even though I probably annoyed them with my incessant questions. I'm currently in the process of transitioning to software and I don't have nearly as much support now. I enjoy it more, but the learning curve is much more daunting.

I'm curious, how many real competitors are there to IBM in the mainframe space? From what I've seen the majority of the products in use are basically IBM only.

The main competitor isn't other mainframes, but PCs.

A lot of mainframe users never needed a mainframe, they just didn't want to get fired for not buying IBM. Other users need some sort of mainframe reliability, but that's also achievable on a distributed system running on unreliable PCs.

There are some users whose use is genuinely deeply entwined with features mainframes provide, but those are dying out.

> Other users need some sort of mainframe reliability, but that's also achievable on a distributed system running on unreliable PCs.

I don't buy this. Many of our critical systems are on PC architectures. Mainframes don't have some magic sauce, well designed distributed architectures should offer enough reliability.

Edit: reading comprehension fail, please ignore my comment :-)

Even with your edit this is worth replying to:

Why waste your money on a single rack-mounted PC when you can buy 40 cheap cellphones running Android and network them together. That'll probably provide greater reliability.

The obvious answer is the same as why some use mainframes over PCs. You can't easily convert all workloads running on a rack-mounted PC to a network of cellphones. Similarly, you can't easily convert all programs running on mainframes to running on PCs.

Which is what I was alluding to with the last paragraph in my upthread comment. There are mainframe use-cases that are genuinely entwined with those hardware platforms. A mainframe isn't just a fridge-sized PC.

The obvious answer is that a stack of cheap cellphones running Android is a pain to develop for, deploy and manage compared to something actually designed for server use. These are probably not areas where mainframes have the upper hand this century.

You seem to be saying the same thing as the line you quoted: both of you are pointing out that distributed PCs can achieve comparable reliability.

Yeah, you're right, it's too early in the morning for comments. I'll leave my comment up so that others can make fun of it :-p

Back in the day, it was "IBM and the seven dwarfs", Digital Equipment, Control Data, General Electric, RCA, Univac, Burroughs, and Honeywell. Later, Amdahl offered fully-IBM-mainframe compatible systems. Tandem's specialty was fully redundant, fault-tolerant systems.

https://it.toolbox.com/blogs/shayne-nelson/the-60s-ibm-the-s...

By the 1990s, "big iron" referred not only to mainframe (S360 descendants -- now S390 / zOS), but big Unix vendors: Sun (now Oracle), HP, Data General, SGI, etc.

Some of these still survive in some form:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainframe_computer#Current_mar...

I didn't want to explicitly reveal the name, but perhaps I should clarify that it was a software company and it was big relatively to other software companies in mainframe space, not to IBM.

In mainframe hardware, IBM doesn't have much direct competitors. In mainframe software, there are many but most of the are much smaller than IBM, so it is often more symbiotic than competitive relationship.

There used to be quite a few different mainframes on the market. HP/Tandem had their Non-stop systems which was perhaps the most distinct competitor - but there were quite a few companies competing in the space.

However, IBM has dominated this market for as long as I can remember and today I believe they are the only ones making mainframe computers.

Amdahl was notable for having a clone that could run IBM mainframe code.

I think Fujitsu still makes mainframes. That might be it... Hitachi was another one, but they quit the mainframe business in 2017 or so.

Oracle :-|

Fujitsu and Sun/Oracle

One day I have to take the time to write a blog post on how I started my engineering career at IBM working on mainframe at 21, then freaked out 6 years later in one of the biggest bank in the world where most of those older people where incompetent and judgemental. Everything was dinosaurs in constant politics and lies on both side, vendors and clients.

Worst IT practices and work ethics you could imagine. Lost source code, no comments/documentation, no tests, no monitoring, no benchmarks ... most of the work was done by people without a degree in anything and stayed around for decades. It's not well thought engineering.

I enjoyed working on mainframes, I still think it's amazing technology. Some of my colleagues where the nicest people I ever met, where very skilled and taught me a lot.

But I am now a DevOps working with open source, cloud computing & containerization, everything is nicer and a lot more interesting. And I don't have to fight everyone anymore because I am the one who will have to maintain the crap of retired people (most of the time I would hit a brick wall trying to explain what is IT in the 21st century).

> in one of the biggest bank in the world where most of those older people where incompetent and judgemental. Everything was dinosaurs in constant politics and lies on both side, vendors and clients.

This is true in most large orgs. That statement was true in the military, tech companies, and the non-tech companies I've worked for. The amount of politics and the size of egos grows exponentially the larger you get.

I agree with your general sentiment, but I'd like to add one observation.

You don't have to be "young" (however one defines that) to try out new things, implement new technology, experiment, bring new viewpoints and the like. Unless you simply define "young" as people who do those very things, which divorces the notion of "youth" from calendar age... which is probably the correct way to look at it. There's no particular reason, for example, to think that someone who's 60 is not interesting in "trying out new things", "experimenting", etc. OTOH, you could have someone who's 26 who is very stuck in their ways and not interested in doing anything new.

I don't disagree but it seems to me that these things require, more than young age, a certain "naivete".

The more expertise you get the more nuanced view of things you get, and it really complicates the problem analysis and the decision of how should you proceed. Basically, as you learn, you become overfitted to the current solution - you see so many problems with other approaches that they seem unfeasible. But people with less experience do not have this "problem". They will happily proceed and experiment. This would by itself end in a disaster, but with the proper guidance of expert, worst ideas can be avoided and the result is often beneficial.