Re:The mainframe is alive and thriving
by fallingknife on Thursday March 11, 2021 @09:36PM
(#26431656)
What does the mainframe do that makes it take years and cost $1B to replace? I'm guessing that it didn't take that much time and money to set up the mainframe in the first place. So why does it cost that much to build an equivalent system today?
[ Parent
| on HN ]
In most cases, it's running millions of lines of legacy code that interacts with all sorts of crufty, decades-old proprietary software components. (iow, it's not COBOL itself that blocks a migration, it's the fact that real-world COBOL code tends to rely on this terrible proprietary stuff. I mean, it's nothing that couldn't be dealt with cleanly if a gigadollar was literally on the line, but I suspect that such figures are somewhat exaggerated.)