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by gaius 3889 days ago
... Which they did perfectly well in the 60s on a mainframe. Why does it take - conservatively estimating - a million times more CPU cycles now?
1 comments

They're most likely still running all their transaction processing on a single mainframe (+another one for redundancy) with something like IBM CICS [1, 2]. And they most likely also have a lot more transactions than in the 60s (card payments, internet banking, etc.).

[1] http://www.ibm.com/software/htp/cics/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CICS - yes, "Initial release: 1968; 47 years ago"