[phasetransition]

Son of a COBOL dev... All this virtualization mess, minus the extra Java layer, started back in the 90s, courtesy of Unisys. I remember my dad pulling his hair out when I was in High School, though I did not understand why back then.

[jacquesm]

I think you get it now though. I've seen this whole industry up close for the last 40 years or so and it's absolutely incredible how we went from a machine with 32 M of RAM and 300 M of storage sufficient to serve 1400 branch offices of a bank to a phone with a very large multiple of that, that can barely serve a single user.

[mrweasel]

That is some thing that I can't stop thinking about. I get that banking software does more, like online banking, larger transaction volume, more account and loan types, but why is it that we can not run a small to medium bank on a single modern CPU and 1TB of memory?

[jacquesm]

Eye candy. Endless abstraction layers.

[snotrockets]

That phone does a lot more than the bank mainframe used to do.

[jazzyjackson]

> iphone hangs while trying to match "blu" up with "bluetooth settings"

So many background tasks, much computation

[g805]

"Busy" and "useful" are entirely different things. Maybe all that extra capability would be better spent elsewhere.