Hacker News Reader

Comment by JohnJamesRambo | Hacker News Reader

I find the mainframe era romantic. I remember in college when I first got there people sending statistics jobs over to the mainframe.

I wanted a future where people had big mainframes in their basement (like a furnace) as the sole computing source for their house and terminals in every room. Instead we got no one using computers and everyone having a dumbed down phone. :(

View on HN

Except that the "dumbed down" phone most likely has a whole lot more computing power than any of the big mainframes you might have used in college.

Yes, but dumbed down probably refers more to the capabilities rather than the computing power. Phones are great, but aren't really for real work.

So I can submit jobs to them and have them do arbitrary computations for me? I can’t even get easy unfettered access to the filesystem for christ’s sake.

As it turns, out, the vast majority of people don't need to do arbitrary computations on a regular basis.

For those two do need it, you don't need a mainframe sitting in your basement like a furnace when a Rapsberry Pi has 500x the processing power of an IBM 4300 from the 1980s for a fraction of the price and size and power consumption.

There is absolutely no need to shit on the capabilities of modern smartphones when "arbitrary computation" devices are so cheap, small, and ubiquitous.

Comparing apples and oranges. The smartphone or Raspberry PI may have more CPU power, but has far less redundancy.

consumers instead of people ️ i guess it's true for many other aspects of life. but it's a bit worse.

It’s a bad analogy. Phone is the mainframe eras terminal (also dumb btw) and the internet is the time shared mainframe you “can submit jobs to”.

You probably can’t access mainframes file system directly either. That’s a security and reliability feature.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com