
Bailing out of the mainframe industry (1984) - luu
https://www.nytimes.com/1984/02/05/business/bailing-out-of-the-mainframe-industry.html
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combatentropy
This sounds like a classic case of the Innovator's Dilemma. The ascendance of
the personal computer in the 1980s upset many large companies. I was surprised
how old some of them were:

1879 - NCR

1886 - Burroughs

1906 - Honeywell

1910 - Sperry

1911 - IBM

~~~
simonh
Not mainframes I know, but I saw this happening to Prime Computer back in the
early 90s. We had a Prime at Wolverhampton Poly (UK) when I was a student, and
my first job was at a Forestry Commission Research Station down in Surrey and
they had a Prime as well. I used to come in early to change the 1/2" backup
tape spools.

That company did everything they could to stay relevant. I went on a training
course on their new x86 Unix boxes, but we ended up buying from SUN. The late
80s/90s saw a lot of odd computing architectures and ideosyncratic systems. I
worked on a Pick system once, with a dictionary based file system. PCs and
Unix paved over everything between them by the end of the 90s though. Sorry,
rambling.

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tyingq
And now we're back to building stuff from a fixed set of blessed components
from a couple of giant vendors :)

~~~
pjmlp
Cloud computing with the browser as thin terminal, and around the circle they
go.

The irony is getting one of those rich clients for microservices hosted on IBM
and Unisys mainframes, written in Cobol, NEWP, RPG.

~~~
cstross
The "wheel of reincarnation" is a thing in multiple sub-fields of computing:
where there are two approaches to an architectural solution, an arms race
between competing models often develops. (In the 1960s-2000s in computer
graphics it was a competition between dedicated GPU hardware -- e.g. Evans and
Sutherland, Silicon Graphics -- and throw lots of CPUs at the problem and
solve it in code. _That_ race was ultimately run by the masses of GPUs thanks
to Moore's Law, but for a while there was a competing model where commodity
CPUs and software could undercut on price. Similarly: departmental
minicomputers, corporate-wide mainframe, and feral PCs roaming the desktop is
a similar story of competing models.)

