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A comment on Ask HN: Why is there so little info on the web about IBM mainframe programming?. Parent comment

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…

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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

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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

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