The Mainframe Six (2022)
8 comments
·October 24, 2025bob1029
adamzwasserman
A hacker classic: https://www.hactrn.net/sra/vaxen.html
p_l
You don't have to pay upfront, IBM in fact prefers you don't
Leasing, or frank out renting aka "cloud" that just happens to be IBM is the preferred form, especially as they can sell you on usage based pricing (good if your workload follows common pattern of spiking at end of month)
null
[deleted]
kps
Needs a catchy name.
- 1960s: IBM and the Seven Dwarfs [Univac RCA NEC GE Honeywell CDC Burroughs]
- 1970s: IBM and the BUNCH [Burroughs Univac NEC CDC Honeywell]
rbanffy
Let's see...
IBM and the FUNHA?
IBM and the HU-FAN?
Aloha
What about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratus_VOS
It certainly looks mainframe like to me
null
[deleted]
Mainframe is still my favorite architecture for F100 use cases. You'll note how your grocery stores, debit cards, gas stations, toll roads, et. al., continued to function ~fine during the AWS outage this week.
The biggest problem with the mainframe conversation is the TCO paradox that it creates. For the average CTO, the prospect of paying IBM millions of dollars up front is absolutely a non-starter. They just can't get beyond this aspect. It doesn't matter if you promise them a genie with unlimited wishes at the end - and this isn't too far off from what you actually get in some cases. The initial sticker shock is simply a bridge too far.
The savings you see only manifest after years of not doing the other things. This kind of savings is usually invisible to the business leaders. You have to make a really big leap of faith and have a lot of good mentors and leaders around you to execute on this kind of architecture. It is also essential to lead the technology people along the path of best practices. I've seen a large corporation justify moving away from mainframe after allowing its employees to load applications on it that are wildly unsuitable for that kind of compute platform. Think things like SalesForce and GitHub Enterprise - "See, it runs like ass and IBM is billing us like crazy! - we need to get off mainframe".