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The Mainframe World Is Alive, Even For Those Under 40
willdavid writes with a link to a report by Jeff Gould at Interop Systems, about the definitely-still-around world of mainframe computing, from which he extracts:
"Last week I had the occasion to visit SHARE, the premier mainframe conference, which was held in San Jose just down the road from where I live.
Based on what I saw, there is one thing I can tell you for sure, and that is that Cobol is not dead. And neither is the mainframe.
When I mentioned to one of my friends that I had been to SHARE, he joked that it must have looked like an AARP convention. But this turned out not to be so. While there were certainly a few 60-somethings strolling around the halls, the under 40 generation was also well represented. What struck me the most was not the advanced age of the people but the relative youth of a lot of the software being discussed."
However, it's not all fountain of youth there, either. (Thanks, BDPrime.)
For many people, the image of a mainframe computer is a complex of dozens of refrigerator-sized cabinets containing tape drives, disks, processors, and communications hardware located in a freezing room, consuming enough electricity to power a small city.
Mainframes are not dead. All of the top 25 banks world-wide run mainframes, as do 23 of the top 25 U.S. retailers and 9 of the top 10 global insurance companies. 80% of the world's corporate data exists on mainframes.
You ask, why have companies continued to use large scale computers, despite the ubiquity of microprocessor-based servers?
This is why.