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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.)
The ol' yellow number 2 pencil is still around as well, as is shoe-making, wine-barrel repair, and of course the oldest tool in the book ... the tool.
Of these, shoe-making and wine-barrel repair deal with things which are not yet obsolete, and the number 2 pencil has the advantage that it's eraseable, machine-readable, cheap, and requires no batteries.
Like humans all technologies find their place in the universe.
Not really. Seen any steam engines lately?
You see, unlike the things you've listed, the mainframe really provides (as far as I know) no advantage over a modern Linux system (or cluster) other than that people already know it, and that it will run these old COBOL apps.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!