O'Reilly On The Importance Of The Mainframe Heritage

theodp writes "After exchanging e-mail with mainframe software pioneer Mario Morino, Tim O'Reilly writes 'It's important for the open source community to look more at the software heritage of the mainframe era.' O'Reilly might want to take a look at how Marino's own MICS software has been used since the 80's to automatically charge IBM mainframe users for printed material that could be ordered from PC clients with a single action by using billing and shipping information that was previously stored on a Mainframe server. The whole process might seem oddly familiar."