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<p>I think that's an easy case to make for hardware; sooner or later
you run out of vacuum tubes...</p>
<p>Less so with software or maybe not at all. Today, at work at Big
Bank, I can sign on to TSO and it hasn't changed since I was a
freshman, eons ago. That's annoying because I never really did
care for 3270's. However, on the exact same machine, once you are
on, you can switch into Linux (I.E., the OMVS segment). So you
also get all the rotten cryptic utilities that annoy me...</p>
<p>But the children like it because that's what they know. So you
can keep developing in C, Java, C++, Python or whatever is sexy
this decade. You also don't lose your bajillions of hours of man
years in COBOL (which really is easy to learn). It's not just
whether there is anybody around who understands the software, it's
also the cost to port all of it. Even extending year fields by 16
bits turned out to be prodigiously expensive.<br>
</p>
<p>But the value add of the VMS x86_84 is that the base <u>architecture</u>
is very unlikely to ever go away. Not that new hardware won't
happen, but that you can't realistically run out of address
space. The main driver that kills architectures is address space;
not what the processor can compute, but address space. z hardware
is 64 bit; IBM kept coming up with ways to extend the virtual
address space. 24-> 31-> 64.</p>
<p>You can also choose not to make it anymore because you can't
compete; this is what happened with Alpha, the manufacturing costs
essentially because overwhelming as they tried to keep up with
Intel/AMD (think die size)<br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 3/14/20 12:35 AM, David Moylan
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:9CCE9B978F7C964097645E1FC2BC99DD20C353@mail.wiz.local"><span
style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D">All
technology has a use by date at which time it’s only of interest
to enthusiasts, hobbyists, collectors and the like. </span></blockquote>
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