[HECnet] long term paks

I think that's an easy case to make for hardware; sooner or later you run out of vacuum tubes... Less so with software or maybe not at all.? Today, at work at Big Bank, I can sign on to TSO and it hasn't changed since I was a freshman, eons ago.? That's annoying because I never really did care for 3270's.? However, on the exact same machine, once you are on, you can switch into Linux (I.E., the OMVS segment).? So you also get all the rotten cryptic utilities that annoy me... But the children like it because that's what they know.? So you can keep developing in C, Java, C++, Python or whatever is sexy this decade.? You also don't lose your bajillions of hours of man years in COBOL (which really is easy to learn).? It's not just whether there is anybody around who understands the software, it's also the cost to port all of it.? Even extending year fields by 16 bits turned out to be prodigiously expensive. But the value add of the VMS x86_84 is that the base _architecture_ is very unlikely to ever go away.? Not that new hardware won't happen, but that you can't realistically run out of address space.? The main driver that kills architectures is address space; not what the processor can compute, but address space.? z hardware is 64 bit; IBM kept coming up with ways to extend the virtual address space. 24-> 31-> 64. You can also choose not to make it anymore because you can't compete; this is what happened with Alpha, the manufacturing costs essentially because overwhelming as they tried to keep up with Intel/AMD (think die size) On 3/14/20 12:35 AM, David Moylan wrote: