Hacker News Reader

It's a mainframe. If you can't get excited for mainframes it'll be hard to be excited about this.

IllumOS is the OS/360 to Oxide's System/360. (It won't get that popular but it's a fair enough comparison for illustrative purposes)

View on HN

Except that it use the same standard CPU as commodity machine. Doesn't have much of the extra reliability stuff. It can go from vertical to horizontal scaling. The OS is open source Unix. And yeah its not like a mainframe at all really.

It's a mainframe, for people who do not, actually, know what a mainframe is or does.

I bet it costs a fraction of what a similarly powerful mainframe would cost. However I don't think the customers for each overlap that much. If you need a mainframe, you need one and there is no discussion about possible alternatives because there are none.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com