Half-century milestone for IBM mainframes

bbc.co.uk

17 pointslouthy2 comments

A lot of companies still pay $5-$20mil for these things so they can continue to write COBOL... COBOL itself, being an interesting beast...

What's funny is the way a lot of the software packages for mainframes are licensed... rather than a per-seat, per-socket, per-core fees... they have per-cpu-cycle fee. So the more you use their product, the more they bill you every month. Absolutely brilliant way to extort money from your customers.

You better tell Amazon/Microsoft/Google about their extortion via their cloud services then. There was a time where IBM would include the software with their hardware and were eventually called out by Burroughs who complained they couldn't compete. This is what brought about the usage model that is copied by cloud providers.

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