The revenge of the Mainframe

There was a time when it looked like the mainframe would go the way of the horse and buggy. I remember a meeting almost two decades ago when a senior IBM executive defended the mainframe by pointing out that dinosaurs were remarkably durable. They roamed the Earth for over a hundred million years. What was it about the mainframe that had so many of us convinced that it would become extinct? There were three key factors; the cost of the platform, the complexity of the development environment and the inflexibility of the platform to change as the IT environment changed. Had IBM not made some significant changes in the platform, the mainframe would have died.

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