Linux "vs" mainframes

[Jonathan Hutchins]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jim Herrmann [mailto:b3d at kc.rr.com]

> Does a KDE abend bring down Linux?  

I've had it kill the console I/O completely enough that it might as well.  I
suppose I could have logged in over the network (except the system was
secured), and killed/restarted some things that way, but I've had to hit
"Reset" more than once.

> > Just handwaving a bit, maybe 390's extreme reliability is due to the
> > (possible) fact that very few new people are learning 390 
> > and very little new code is being written for it.  

> I think there are a couple of million of COBOL programmers 
> that would beg to differ about there being no new code written for it.  

A large percentage of Cobol programmers do maintenance, not new projects.

But as someone else pointed out, there are new license statistics that show
a steady growth of the S390 platform (which is now called something else,
IBM renamed everything a while back).

390's are reliable because they do such an incredible job of isolating jobs
from system tasks that they make *NIX systems look like pikers (except maybe
*NIX running under the S390 VM...