alt Hacker NewsDepends what you mean; but not necessarily.
I am managing an ERP system implemented / went live in 2016. It's working on modern P10 hardware, which was released in 2021. The ERP system is continually updated by the vendor and customized by the client.
Even for COBOL running on an actual mainframe, which I think most HNers would think of 1970s dinosaur, most of the actual machines in production would be pretty new. IBM z16 was launched in 2022.
So they are "legacy systems" in the sense they're not written on a javascript framework which was launched last week, running on lambda instances in AWS :). But they are not "OLD" systems, as such.
Yep, the system is old in the same way that we could call x86 "old". The architecture is backwards compatible with instructions going back to the mid 1960s...but that doesn't mean new instructions and updates to the ISA aren't being pushed out on a pretty regular cadence.
The new Telum II processor (and certainly this also implies another big ISA update and new hardware cycle) was announced at Hot Chips just a few weeks ago for example. See:
https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/09/08/telum-ii-at-hot-chips-...