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Comment by tryauuum | Hacker News Reader

Is this where we are right now as a society: a terminal which doesn't die in a month is presented as an achievement?

I assume the achievement part is that any CPU can be replaced transparently to the terminal running?

I've not worked with a mainframe, but I've worked with an IBM storage system that worked on similar principles: We could connect our systems via dual controllers, to separate bays of controllers on the storage array. You could pull whole bays of controller cards and the system would stay up. You could pull whole bays of hard drives, and the system would stay up. You could pull power supplies and it'd remain up. You could swap RAM and CPUs in the servers managing it without shutting them down, but you could also pull one of those servers, and it'd remain up. If stuff started failing, and IBM engineer would show up because the system would call home. This was around 25 years ago.

It wasn't cheap, but it made a typical "modern" high availability setup look like a crude homemade toy.

But as impressive as it was, there are just very few places where that impressiveness provides enough value to justify the cost. And having to deal with IBM.

Yes, Hard drives can die, power supply can die, another user can write an infinite loop and it will not kill your terminal.

Not a big deal today, but in the 80s hard drives died more frequently and a bank losing just 5 seconds of transactions could cost them millions.

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