[kw71]

Writing off all the big computer shop stuff as irrelevant means you throw away all the experience and best practices and will be repeating the mistakes people made 50 years ago. And maybe reinvent some wheels too.

A computer center is your best resource for observing and learning how to build computer services, deploy them, and keep them available. And for knowing what experienced computing people and their customers expect.

And some of the stuff you do today is descended from here:

You probably wrote this comment in a program that displays forms, and allows you to fill in forms and call up other forms. This is how the 3270 terminal worked.

Maybe you have some hypervisor running somewhere. Welcome to 1970s IBM. We don't want to rewrite our 360 stuff so we will emulate the 360 in its own sandbox.

Saddest part of these things, when they come into general awareness one way or another, they are so out of tune with the universe that the public hail them as new "technology." The ideas are old, it's only some new implementation or circumstance that's novel.

[ratling]

It’s not completely irrelevant. Like I said, if you know you need big iron you use big iron (I dealt with as400s and cobol for years).

But it’s not a commonly taught tech anymore. I look at it like a lot of niche languages. Erlang has a lot of great advantages but if it costs several multiples more budget to hire for I’m going with python if I can get away with it.

I will always use the most boring possible tool to solve a problem because I don’t want to get stuck as the “that thing” guy. And because I’d rather spend my “effort” bucks on stuff that directly makes me money.

Edit: I’ve seen zseries feature set and it’s impressive. Still not going to use it over AWS if I can get away with it.