Re:Ask HN: Why is there so little info on the web about IBM ...
by dghlsakjg on Monday November 28, 2022 @07:20PM
(#33781881)
The flip side of that is that commodity hardware runs commodity software. It’s entirely possible to run a very large company without having any bespoke software.
Mainframes on the other hand or more likely than not to have software that only runs on a handful of machines at most.
So number of machines is not a good proxy for amount of software written.
On the other hand I’ve never touched a mainframe so it’s all speculation…
Re:Ask HN: Why is there so little info on the web about IBM ...
by warrenm on Tuesday November 29, 2022 @08:44AM
(#33787449)
>It’s entirely possible to run a very large company without having any bespoke software.
I find that claim remarkably improbable - the overwhelming majority of all code written is for in-house business tasks
Re:Ask HN: Why is there so little info on the web about IBM ...
by warrenm on Tuesday November 29, 2022 @08:45AM
(#33787465)
>So number of machines is not a good proxy for amount of software written.
It is a good proxy for the relative need of developers, however - with billions of x86 devices out there vs max a couple-few million mainframes...the scale of need is just wildly different
Multiply his estimate to 1000 per F500 company ... that's only half a million
Put a pair in every major geography ... that's only 5,000,000
And, for kicks and giggles, multiple by another 10 for funzies
That 50,000,000
Yes, it's "a lot" ... but it's nothing compared to commodity hardware
According to a quick web search, Google alone had in excess of 1,000,000 x86 servers about a decade ago
That's one (large) company
I've worked with myriad companies who're running 10s or 100s of 1000s of x86 servers (let alone x86 desktops/workstations/laptops) - with nary a mainframe in sight (or maybe a couple ... which is on the order of "none" next to 100s of 1000s or millions of x86 boxes)
Per Microsoft [0], there are 1.4 billion Windows 10 and 11 devices (yes, I know that's not a server count, but it speaks to the orders of magnitude difference between x86 devices and mainframes ...even with my generous estimates posted above)
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[0] https://news.microsoft.com/bythenumbers/en/windowsdevices