[bob1029]

Mainframe business is still a big deal in a lot of places. Banking, finance, insurance, etc. It is a game of inertia & historical baggage, but that also brings with it a stabilizing aspect. Next time you swipe your debit or credit card, you are almost certainly interacting with at least one mainframe. Likely several if the transaction is processed "online".

You might be able to build a more reliable & cheaper system using x86/ARM in a modern datacenter, but you would have a hell of a time getting regulators to approve it. You'd have to make IBM-free finance/insurance your entire business if you wanted to try it out. For those in the industry, it's usually not even worth talking about until you are at the M&A table and someone has a shitload of capital they would like to set on fire.

Starting from zero is not really an option for the types of businesses that are most entrenched in mainframe usage. Part of it is this legacy, but I strongly believe the other part is "valuable lessons learned over many decades". Not rocking the boat used to be something that really bothered me in my 20s and early 30s. Now, I totally get the mindset. Staying on IBM is the most responsible option in many places. It's not impossible to teach GenZ to write COBOL. Failing that, I am certain we will have an LLM that can bridge the gap soon enough.

[Rochus]

> It is a game of inertia & historical baggage

New is not always better, especially if your company essentially depends on high availabilty and security of their core systems

> more reliable & cheaper system using x86/ARM

The hardware is just a single aspect of reliability and total cost of ownership, not even the most important one.

> It's not impossible to teach GenZ to write COBOL

Not even Java or C++ as it seems.