I don't dispute that; every niche has a growth phase and a decline phase. See: Minicomputers or RISC workstations. However, given a nearly 60 year run so far, and an expectation that there's a couple more decades of life it it, we should be so lucky if whatever niche we work in 'fails to thrive' like that.

The replacement for a RISC workstation was an Intel one serving the same role for the same kind of customer. The mainframe doesn't have that sort of path.

> The mainframe doesn't have that sort of path.

Datacenter-scale compute on non-proprietary platforms (e.g. leveraging OCP standards and best practices, which have been developed w/ significant input from FAANG and 'cloud' vendors) can easily tackle any mainframe workload. The implied path is obvious.

Yes, and you can see the mainframe origins in the modern cloud. It was funny to see the predecessor to Kubernetes (Borg) had a language that was even a wink and a nod to JCL called BCL that then evolved into Kubernetes's resource config files.

That being said, it takes a massive commitment and pretty much a rewrite from scratch to achieve a jump from mainframe to modern DC. You need to embrace individual node failure and that's not something you can just hack in.

This is actually a good comment - look at a datacenter and squint, and tell me - is it not justa a new mainframe?

AWS, Azure and GCP are all proprietary, and all are producing larger and larger servers and VMs. They are basically rentable, virtualised mainframes at this point

Can you provide an example of a company that migrated their mainframe based highly-available transactions oriented workload, to what you mention?

Also note Apple is transitioning their Unix workstation line back to RISC.

Yeah, RISC is good. RISC architecture is going to change everything! (according to Apple, ofc. /s)

Wasn’t Nathan Myhrvold spouting this continuously at Microsoft in the 80’s that RISC was going to take over imminently? While that’s more likely presently than it ever was then, it still isn’t clear that it is even close to happening is it?

The only reason it failed is because there was little incentive to port software away from x86.

Most of us didn't consider writing cross-platform software back then and the few who did were writing software for Unix, not Windows, and that because there wasn't a single dominant OS (Unix was a fuzzy target) and binary architecture you could write for, so you had to think about portability.

Oddly enough, there was a lot of cross-platform work on games in the 80's because the home computer market was very fragmented.

Thanks for this informative response!

haha, thanks Dade

I think the difference is that the mainframe isn’t going anywhere and the large companies themselves have been thriving and will likely continue to do so. My employer has a number of them and they work great although it’s challenging to find the developers. If it was my decision to migrate I’d be hesitant because it seems as though infrastructure is priced low enough to convince people to switch but then will likely creep up over time in either prices or lock-in.

Their anecdata beats your unsourced generalization.

No, mine is anecdata too, just more of it. And neither wins because there's actual data out there about the size and velocity of the mainframe market. I just don't much care to look it up every time someone makes an unfounded declaration that mainframes are dead. And, since we're keeping score, zero content snark is bottom of the heap.

I was saying your anecdata beats the other guy. I definitely agree the mainframe ain't dead.

> And, since we're keeping score, zero content snark is bottom of the heap.

That's just hurtful, man.