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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

It is funny how we've regressed. For CRUD apps that don't do anything graphical, the current crop of web apps don't do anything better than a mainframe and a 3270 terminal did 50+ years ago. And the man-hours required to produce and maintain them is much higher.

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That is an extreme simplification. Modern crud apps run from essentially any network in the world on hardware of every conceivable form factor and vendor. The protocol is open and so obvious it is routinely taught to middle school children.

All of those things are significantly different than a mainframe/term setup

I disagree. TN3270 runs on essentially any network in the world, and has existed for quite some time. I am scoping this down to CRUD apps that are text and labels.

50 years ago it ran only on a single proprietary physical medium on bespoke hardware.

Amdahl was an option.

I'm currently on my phone on a streetcar in San Francisco. I'm pretty confident there's one of those platforms I could access now with the greatest of ease, and the other would take some doing.

I first heard the "but ... the Web is just Mainframe terminals" realisation about 1997-98 or so.

And there's a fair bit of truth to that.

For CRUD apps that don't do anything graphical, the current crop of web apps don't do anything better than a mainframe and a 3270 terminal did 50+ years ago.

It's not actually true (unicode alone is a big improvement), but even if it was, so what? If a technology already fulfilled those needs pretty well, why would you expect major improvements to arise? The improvements come from the fact that you don't have to restrict yourself to text and labels.

> why would you expect major improvements to arise?

Maybe not, but you certainly shouldn't expect a regression, which is exactly what we're witnessing.

I would. A more general system will (almost?) always be less efficient than a single-purpose system, at that specific purpose.

I don't think modern CRUD apps are necessarily more general. They're just built on top of many more layers of broken abstractions.

You don't think that modern CRUD apps do anything besides showing text and labels?

I mentioned the man hours to build and maintain. That should have been an area for progress. It wasn't.

Can't argue with you there, I have no idea how much time it took on a 3270. That said, are you thinking about the time to build and maintain it from scratch? Because there are plenty of CRUD frameworks to remove 90% of the work. Of course, those have to be built and maintained as well, but then again, so did the 3270 terminals.

If you don't care about "making it pretty", you can make a cookie-cutter 3270-style UI pretty easily.

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