

Half-century milestone for IBM mainframes - louthy
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26886579

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exabrial
A lot of companies still pay $5-$20mil for these things so they can continue
to write COBOL... COBOL itself, being an interesting beast...

What's funny is the way a lot of the software packages for mainframes are
licensed... rather than a per-seat, per-socket, per-core fees... they have
per-cpu-cycle fee. So the more you use their product, the more they bill you
every month. Absolutely brilliant way to extort money from your customers.

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zmonkeyz
You better tell Amazon/Microsoft/Google about their extortion via their cloud
services then. There was a time where IBM would include the software with
their hardware and were eventually called out by Burroughs who complained they
couldn't compete. This is what brought about the usage model that is copied by
cloud providers.

