[akira2501]

> Not sure how IBM folks could not see this opportunity just because it was smaller scale than "what they did".

I encourage everyone to get a copy of the Hercules emulator and a copy of the "Turn Key 5" MVS distribution and spend a little time using it. The mainframe idea of "computing" and "running jobs" is so comprehensively different it's really hard to map any previous consumer computing experience into it. It's also just a lot of fun because of that.

The whole experience is centered around efficient use of machine resources while providing a comprehensive batch execution and scheduling system for centralized job execution in this environment. The level of accounting, reporting, repeatability, and job language features is actually something worthwhile to dive into.

In any case, I'm willing to bet that IBM's internal ideology is that end users wouldn't want to do the computing themselves, but would instead go to middle men who would would purchase computing either directly from IBM or as some form of "remote job entry" through a third party provider. To that end they were rapidly building out the infrastructure to do just that.

> Intel seemed to have missed the mobile market due to a similar attitude.

In both cases, they're still here, although Intel did a much better job of catching up to their past mistakes.

[p_l]

IBM on S/360 also did a lot of early interactive computing, not just batch processing.

What was common though then and now was renting computers.

Essentially, cloud computing.