Thanks randux2. I don't think you were stretching out the thread and I'm interested to listening to the point of whoever defends the mainframe. It's true that every client I've worked for was using, one way or another, a mainframe. I do recognize, and that's what I was trying to say, that I don't think there's a killer OS or a killer platform, in general. Diffent OSs fits a set of requirements and I would not even try to substitute a mainframe if I think that a mainframe is the best solution to a particular problem. With the same argument I was saying that a mainframe is probably not the solution to every developer's (or client's) need.

My fear is probably biased with my experience in the Java world and department servers, where IBM has probably null penetration and so it's a non sense trying to compare the two. Indeed, and I didn't make it clear, my fear is related to where the two companies' portfolios are overlapping and mainframe is not there. Thanks for your point, it triggered some interesting search of documentation by my side.

Then again, I may be wrong and they may just send all the Sun employees to India as they seem to be doing with the rest of their company

Good thing for me I like curries and nan

Thanks for your comments, my friend. If I can help you on the mainframe topic, it will be my pleasure.

Sounds like we've pushed someone's buttons.

My link to the model 33 tty was just because I figured most people here might not know what I was referring to. An interesting piece of history, not any sort of proof of any argument.

As I said before, proving or disproving the claim of perfect security over 60 years would take far more effort than it is worth. Case in point: Luxottica experienced a security breach of their mainframe in 2008 that resulted in the leak of personnel information on 59000 people. Can anyone provide details? Everything I could find in an afternoon simply said, the company did not provide any details. Even IT job postings for Luxottica do not mention specific platform experience. I did find one company profile that said Luxottica had been a dedicated IBM shop for a long time. I found another that indicated that mainframes typically do not present themselves to the internet in general, and that the hacker had to get into other systems at Luxottica and use those as an attack platform to get at the mainframe.

My own memories of people getting into mainframes are from the late 1960's to early 1970's. Those were not publicized at all, and I have no way of documenting them. One resulted in a graduating senior getting a systems engineering job, and the other resulted in an undergraduate getting a transfer to a more well endowed University and a job as a student systems programmer. In neither case did it serve anyone involved to publicize the incident. In both cases the "hacker" was a student who openly disclosed their activities.

In any case, let's accept your point of high quality and reliability in IBM's super expensive systems. I would counter that the majority of businesses, universities, and, obviously, individuals cannot afford to spend millions on a mainframe and hundreds of thousands on software. Those systems are the province of major corporations and banks. And IBM has been less than stellar competing in the less expensive arenas. Their corporate glass house, blue suit view hasn't translated downward. They've even dropped out of trying to compete in the lowest end areas, selling off their PC division, for example, to Lenovo. I don't think they know how to deal with a lot of the market areas that Sun operates in. Their motivation might be to knock out Sun as Sun pushes upward into IBM territory.