Can confirm. My old father who works on these mainframes laughs every time.

I posit that most tech companies make money by poorly recreating old technologies for use by younger people ignorant of the old ones.

E.g. how many variants of IRC have we had now? Usenet? VMs?

I think we need history classes in programming, and possibly comparative literature classes but for code.

I've long been a proponent of computing history as required part of CS.

Progress is supposed to work by standing on the shoulder of giants. But that only works if engineers are aware of what came before, how it worked, what was good and bad about it.

In the software world the same things are continuously being reinvented but the lessons of the past are not integrated because the inventors have no knowledge of the past 10 times the same thing was done. So every lesson has to be learned anew in production. That's not progress.

Some places have them. I took an elective class at university which focused on open source philosophy & licenses. Read and discussed a bunch of papers written by the guys involved in the early open source movement. Stopped short of code review though: which would have been a nice addition.

A very very good paper, and one that was clearly a passion project for the prof.

I had something like that, that is how I upgraded myself from a UNIX zealot into a Xerox PARC one, as I discovered an alternative universe.

Additionaly the campus library was a treasure trove from computing books all the way back in time, and many of us dived into them.

The distributed computing class had a history of distributed computing component.

But it was an elective, and as I found once I got into the real world, one that most people either opted out of or didn't have the option to take. I spend way too much time providing Cliff's Notes to a class I took almost thirty years ago.

Oh yeah, in a past life I was a CPU logic designer for walk-in, refrigerated mainframes. I was always amused by youngsters thinking they had invented things like pipelines and branch prediction. Seymour Cray and Gene Amdahl were prolific inventors.

And Bob Barton deserves mention for being extremely far-sighted.

I posit that this retreading of old paths was very good for the industry.

All the truly important CPU design features were first invented using discrete logic for mainframes and minicomputers. Then, 20 years later when it became possible to fit them onto a single chip, they were all out of patent, which is precisely what made the early microcomputer industry so competitive. When none of the important stuff could be patented anymore, you could only compete on merit, not by getting a government enforce a monopoly on some critical piece of your design.

I think you make a good point. Although I have seen patents for reinventing something in an expired patent :)

SUN used to say The Network is the Computer...that always reminds me of what is called "cloud" the last 10+ years.

Sun was way ahead of its time. Too far ahead in fact, in the sense that they brought products to market that the market didn't yet realize they wanted.

The Javastation network computer for example, it was a bit like a Chromebook (though incredibly slow -lol)

I think Sun should probably have bought Azul systems during the tech downturn. Even if it turned into a reverse merger (which history suggests may have been the case), it might still be around today.

Basically what cool kids do nowadays with gRPC, I was doing with Sun RPC.

no kidding. same here.

I'm not old enough (or been in the appropriate industry) to have worked with mainframes. I started in the heyday of the workstations (Sun, HP-UX, AIX, SGI) as a reaction to the annoyances of mainframes.

Why pay for disk and compute access when you can have a workstation! Why have limited access to the system when you can have your own! Was the vibe.

It is amusing/sad that in the AWS world we're right back to basically mainframes. Centrally hosted massive compute that you don't really have full control or access and have to pay for use time.

I wonder when the next swing back to personal computing arrives?

You're old enough to have noticed that we cycle between client-server and peer-peer about every decade. Sometimes it's hardware, sometimes it's software.

The pendulum swings, and never seems to stop.

Had the US government not forced IBM to get out of the centralized provision of computing by consent agreements and eventual divestiture, and had the US government not forbidden the Bell System to enter the centralized computing business by the FCCs Computer Inquiry 2, its likely that computing and networking would have evolved in a more rational way that did not include personal computing.

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

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

It takes time and wastes effort, but technology eventually bests politicians.

All this is true but you forget the cost. Mainframe do not allow to start small. I have no idea how much the cheapest mainframe cost but it's porbably more than a dirt cheap x86 server with a bunch of free software so important for student projects, training, hobbies, start-up and cost constrained industries.

just you wait, one day google cloud pub/sub will have a queue pause feature!