[rtempaccount1]

I was at a talk about mainframe security recently where the state of play with one company was, there were three users in their admins group for the mainframe, two had retired, and the third was past retirement age...

When you combine retirements with decades of under-documented code doing critical functions, it's not a recipe for good long term success...

[scottlocklin]

I dunno; rewriting it in some shit tier EC2 FunNewLang framework that changes every year doesn't sound like a recipe for long term success either.

When I look at how mainframes work, and how "clouds" work, I wonder at how imbecilic IBM management (or one of their competitors) must have been to not capture that value in the first place.

[rtempaccount1]

There is a middle ground between those two extremes of course.

I'm not surprised at the mainframe's lack of success at all, the barriers to entry are extreme, meaning there's an inevitable lack of activity.

I've worked in environments which had mainframes deployed and even as an employee it was inordinately difficult to get any access to them.

Combine that with IBM's "enterprise" sales process and it's not a mystery that they lost the fight to attract newer systems...

[w3ll_w3ll_w3ll]

"The Eternal Mainframe"

http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.h...