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Comment by neverartful | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't make sense to me. I believe that IBM has found the forced upgrade path for hardware/software like Apple has perfected. You may not be able to run old versions of IBM's software and still have it be supported by them. Same for the hardware. I don't think you would commonly find and old mainframe (the hardware) in operation. At the last place I worked that had mainframes, they would upgrade to new models every 2-3 years.

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I call BS on this. I never heard of upgrading mainframes every 2-3 years. It makes no sense. Mainframes are huge investments meant to last a long time, it is not a PC you replace in a few years.

Call BS all you want, I don't care. I know what I witnessed. I don't know if the mainframes were owned are leased, but they were swapped out for new ones every few years.

I’d like to hear more then. Mainframes are traditionally a big investment where you consolidate tons of load and jobs and LPARs onto one honking big machine. A very expandable machine in terms of any resource you can think of.

Why would you turn over something like that every few years? Your narrative sounds more like taking about ephemeral cloud stuff, not multi million dollar main frames.

I think in my former employer's case they leased the mainframes because they found it more favorable to have OPEX over CAPEX. Every few years IBM would pitch their latest and greatest and often times it made financial sense (lower costs) to upgrade to the newer models.

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