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A comment on Has Mainframe Computing Inadvertently Started Its Own Culture War?.

Re:Has Mainframe Computing Inadvertently Started Its Own Cul... by mikewarot on Tuesday May 24, 2022 @06:15PM (#31498132)
Mainframes are fast because each given "run time" (aka VM) has a fixed set of resources (aka Capabilities). Unlike the PC world, the default access is NO to any other files, etc.

We in the PC world keep reinventing our terms, the Mainframe folks just keep using the ones settled on decades ago.

You can run a VAX 11/780 in an Emulator, the same is true of many older Mainframes.

There's nothing magic about them, they're just optimized for throughput, in a very specific context.

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Re:Has Mainframe Computing Inadvertently Started Its Own Cul... by arethuza on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @04:41AM (#31501956)
I didn't think a VAX 11/780 was considered a mainframe - rather a minicomputer?
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Re:Has Mainframe Computing Inadvertently Started Its Own Cul... by lproven on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @09:11AM (#31504021)
Agreed.

The VAX 9000 range tried to become mainframes, and the effort to make them bankrupted DEC.

But there are non-IBM mainframes. They do run under emulation on x86, but they are still real. Unisys Clearpath, for instance.

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Re:Has Mainframe Computing Inadvertently Started Its Own Cul... by arethuza on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @10:46AM (#31505321)
The CS course I did in the 1980s had us use a Burroughs mainframe for the first year (complete with MCP) - I think this was a cunning ploy to make us really appreciate Unix when we got to use for the remaining three years....
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Re:Has Mainframe Computing Inadvertently Started Its Own Cul... by lproven on Thursday May 26, 2022 @04:08AM (#31515902)
Just curious: in what ways?

I started out on VAXen before I learned DOS or Xenix, and frankly, I preferred it.

File versioning was wonderful and with that as a basis, we'd never have needed the vile baroque mess that is Git.

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Re:Has Mainframe Computing Inadvertently Started Its Own Cul... by arethuza on Thursday May 26, 2022 @05:42AM (#31516419)
The Burroughs user environment was a thing called CANDE - which really wasn't much fun at all:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDE

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Re:Has Mainframe Computing Inadvertently Started Its Own Cul... by lproven on Friday May 27, 2022 @04:02AM (#31527145)
How odd. That sounds very strange, but now I want to try it. :-)
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