alt Hacker NewsI was kind of disappointed the first time I saw an IBM mainframe and it kinda just looked like a rack of servers. To be fair, it was taking up a little bit of a server room that had clearly been designed for a larger predecessor and now almost had enough free space for a proper game of ping pong.
Hyperscaler rack designs definitely blur this line further. In some ways I think Oxide is trying to reinvent the mainframe, in a world where the suppliers got too much leverage and started getting uppity.
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Nah, oxide is standardizing pluggable, scalable, rack-unit API driven local cloud, with extremely tight integration that nobody else has largely except Apple.
There's different takes on it, that's just mine. I really appreciate and respect their work.
My school district growing up had a decently sized Unisys mainframe. While I was working there, they upgraded to a new machine.
The old machine was about desk height and 15 feet wide. The new machine was a 4u box running a Unisys mainframe emulator on NT 4, on a quad processor pentium pro. Pretty sad. But they did keep the giant line printer, at least while I was working there.