I thought I was one of the last of the Mohicans when I graduated college with a concentration in COBOL programming in 1987. Well, it kept me fed for eighteen years before I moved over into quality assurance, so no complaints.
Mainframes work. Only now are server clusters even getting close to the data throughput speed and bulletproof reliability. The problem is getting “latest-and-greatest” obsessed execs to realize this.
}:-)4
My wife graduated in 1972 and has been working with mainframes and COBOL ever since.
I agree with you on this point, but how can you convince modern schoolkids who:
Never read the manual
Learn by the 'flying fingers' approach
Have been brought up to accept "the blue screen means reboot it"
Are also brought up to know that "the network is slow"
They don't know what they are missing, BUT they teach themselves and they come cheap.
Only you can still cluster mainframes. Use a parallel sysplex in datacenter and most applications won't even hiccup if one server goes down, or you can sysplex 32 systems over 120 miles apart.
I like commodity hardware clusters. I really do. They're relatively cheap and give good performance and reliability. But they will never, ever be able to completely take the place of mainframes.