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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

At least if you went with IBM and followed the old adage “no one ever got fired for buying IBM” in the 80s, you can still buy new supported hardware to run your old code on. If you went with their competitors, not so much.

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You certainly can, but the prices haven’t decreased (and probably increased) from their 80s values, even though the thing is now probably a dinosaur.

Which of their competitors can you still buy new faster hardware from? Does anyone sell Stratus VOS or DEC VAX VMS compatible systems?

Yeah I know I am showing my age....

The people who designed their systems such that they could be easily transitioned off of IBM have done so long ago. Those systems now run exponentially cheaper and have access to more resources.

Vendor lock-in was just as much of a problem then as now.

Yes because people in the 80s writing COBOL were writing AbstractFactorySingletonBeans to create a facade to make their transitions to newer platforms easier....

> Does anyone sell... DEC VAX VMS compatible systems?

https://www.avtware.com/cloud

Someone should check if it can run OpenGenera.

Well, our next iSeries is a whole lot cheaper than our current iSeries and quite a bit more powerful. The Power 9 is not something I would call a dinosaur.

IBM's prices haven't changed at all since the 80s. They're still four times as expensive as they should be.

Sounds like you've described IBM being priced exactly right, given their tenacious longevity.

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