I was kind of disappointed the first time I saw an IBM mainframe and it kinda just looked like a rack of servers. To be fair, it was taking up a little bit of a server room that had clearly been designed for a larger predecessor and now almost had enough free space for a proper game of ping pong.

Hyperscaler rack designs definitely blur this line further. In some ways I think Oxide is trying to reinvent the mainframe, in a world where the suppliers got too much leverage and started getting uppity.

Nah, oxide is standardizing pluggable, scalable, rack-unit API driven local cloud, with extremely tight integration that nobody else has largely except Apple.

There's different takes on it, that's just mine. I really appreciate and respect their work.

They aren’t standardizing the way the PC was standardized. They’re making custom hardware with custom connectors. Their parts are interchangeable with themselves but the rack is the unit of delivery and operation. Their software is closer to standardizing in the normal sense of the word.

That’s a mainframe, sport. At their height they were modular and in at least IBM’s case they could run with damaged parts and were delivered with dark hardware that could replace damaged parts until a maintenance person could arrive, or be remotely enabled to increase throughput for a fee.

All of this cloud stuff, except the geographical redundancy parts, is recreating software that business had versions of forty years ago.

It really depends on what you mean by “mainframe.” Architecturally, we are nothing like mainframes. But for what mainframe seems to mean for you, I can see your perspective.

(While the rack is the unit of delivery overall, we can ship individual sleds and they’re operator replaceable, if say, one of your sleds dies, incidentally.)

Some of us still touch mainframes, almost daily.

My school district growing up had a decently sized Unisys mainframe. While I was working there, they upgraded to a new machine.

The old machine was about desk height and 15 feet wide. The new machine was a 4u box running a Unisys mainframe emulator on NT 4, on a quad processor pentium pro. Pretty sad. But they did keep the giant line printer, at least while I was working there.

Yeah, isn't this just HPCaaS, with an emphasis on CI workloads?

Seems amazing given that most HPC is locked up in super computers.

Oh the memory. IBM3090 MVS with TSO...

It’s a common refrain on HN this thing is the same as something old. Dagnab those young folks!

People trying to market things create a lot of new terms. They don't want to seem like they're selling the same old thing, but something new and innovative.

Occasionally, the new term is warranted, of course, but that's far less common than simply trying to appear different.

> Crud app

> Slaps cryptocurrency sticker in 2019-2021 era

Gets 1 million $ funding

> in 2025, slaps AI powered sticker

Gets 10 million $ funding.

But its still a crud app nonetheless.

I know it sounds really over the line example but I am sure that there are examples like this where the same thing gets some new terms and it gets a lot of funding that is, there is an incentive to put on new stickers.

The goal is not to appear different, the goal is probably profit, which they can get if they can get better funding I suppose, and they get better funding by slapping stickers.

It pretty much is the same, the only change is the level of abstraction. Apparently the easiest thing for everyone is just giving the user access to the whole damn OS via a container, rather than have them deal with vendor specific mainframe minutea.

If you stay around long enough the pendulum swings full circle.

Fascinating how the wording has changed from sharing to tenancy. Maybe reading a bit more into it, but isn't it funny how the modern word evokes the landlord/tenant relationship?

(I'm reading into this further than it needs to go for fun, primarily)