Re:Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited a...
by 908B64B197 on Monday April 12, 2021 @09:38PM
(#26787264)
The problem was, undergrads in top 50 CS programs were not using IBM mainframes during the 80's. They were using UNIX.
Same thing today (and a few PC here and there).
Getting access to a mainframe was and still is very expensive. That's why Google, Facebook, everyone post 2000 basically got started on commodity hardware. Because it's cheap, it's what the founders knew and it works. It's also what the top 50 alumni know, and there's no vendor lock-in.
There's a post that I saw on HN a couple weeks ago[1] talking about what an AWS Lambda service would look like in Cobol and I was blown away. This is the stuff my dad used to work on when he was fresh out of college, and I'm not exactly a spring chicken (as evidenced by the fact that I used the phrase "spring chicken")!
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25989454, link to article submitted for the lazy: https://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=18156250&cid...