“Old Hardware” is fake news
The current line of Zseries mainframes is the most advanced server hardware available, and, you pay a substantial premium to get it.
One of the reasons there is still so much COBOL still running is the continuous development of the 360 hardware. A three year refresh cycle that has been sustained for 50 years.
This combined with a zealous commitment to backward compatibility means that the sensible choice has always been upgrade the hardware and maintain the old code, rather than risk a rewrite.
Not to mention the sad history and high failure rate of “let’s move this of the mainframe” to minicomputers, clusters, unix windows and currently “the cloud” projects.
So what we have is lots of 40 to 20 year old systems running on slick hardware, some of which has been well maintained and most of which has been running for years with few changes.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
