It’s not that the mainframe is hard to learn. In fact, the environment is pretty easy to understand once you get past the archaic naming (but let’s not kid ourselves: on the POSIX side we’re still running t[ape]ar[chive] and other archaic tools too).
In a way, the ease IS the problem: the runtime environment for COBOL (and other stuff on the mainframe) assumes that the underlying platform and OS deal with the really hard stuff like HA and concurrent data access and resource cost management. Which, on the mainframe, they do.
Now, contrast that with doing the same thing in, say, a Linux container on AWS. From the stock OS, can you request a write that guarantees lockstep execution across multiple cores and cross-checks the result? No. Can you request multisite replication of the action and verified synchronous on-processor execution (not just disk replication) at both sites such that your active-active multisite instance is always in sync? No. Can you assume that anything written will also stream to tape / cold storage for an indelible audit record? No. Can you request additional resources from the hypervisor that cost more money from the application layer and signal the operator for expense approval? No. (Did I intentionally choose features that DHT technology could replace one day? Yes, I did, and thanks for noticing.)
On the mainframe, these aren’t just OS built-ins. They’re hardware built-ins. Competent operators know how to both set them up and maintain them such that application developers and users never even have to ask for them (ideally). Good shops even have all the runtime instrumentation out there too—no need for things like New Relic or ServiceNow. Does it cost omg so much money? Absolutely. Omg you could hire an army for what it costs. But it’s there and has already been working for decades.
God knows it’s not a panacea—if I never open another session of the 3270 emulator, it’ll be too soon. And a little piece of me died inside every time I got dropped to the CICS command line. And don’t even get me started on the EBCDIC codepage.
Folks are like, “But wait, I can do all of that in a POSIX environment with these modern tools. And UTF-8 too dude. Stop crying.” Yup, you sure can. I’ve done it too. But when we’re talking about AI lifting and shifting code from the mainframe to a POSIX environment, the 10% it can’t do for you is… all of that. It can’t make fundamental architectural decisions for you. Because AI doesn’t (yet) have a way to say, “This is good and that is bad.” It has no qualitative reasoning, nor anticipatory scenario analysis, nor decision making framework based on an existing environment. It’s still a ways away from even being able to say, “If I choose this architecture, it’ll blow the project budget.” And that’s a relatively easy, computable guardrail.
If you want to see a great example of someone who built a whole-body architectural replacement for a big piece of the mainframe, check out Fiserv’s Finxact platform. In this case, they replaced the functionality (but not the language) of the MUMPS runtime environment rather than COBOL, but the theory is the same. It took them 3 companies to get it right. More than $100mm in investment. But now it has all the fire-and-forget features that banks expect on the mainframe. Throw it a transaction entry, and It Just Works(tm).
And Finxact screams on AWS which is the real miracle because, if you’ve only ever worked on general-purpose commodity hardware like x86-based Linux machines, you have no clue how much faster purpose-built transaction processors can be.
You know that GPGPU thing you kids have been doing lately? Imagine you’d been working on that since the 1960s and the competing technology had access to all the advances you had but had zero obligation to service workloads other than the ones it was meant for. That’s the mainframe. You’re trying to compete with multiple generations of very carefully tuned muscle memory PLUS every other tech advancement that wasn’t mainframe-specific PLUS it can present modern OSes as a slice of itself to make the whole thing more approachable (like zLinux) PLUS just in case you get close to beating it, it has the financial resources of half the banks, brokerages, transportation companies, militaries, and governments in the world to finance it. Oh, and there’s a nearly-two century old company with a moral compass about 1% more wholesome than the Devil whose entire existence rests on keeping a mortal lock on this segment of systems and has received either first- or second-most patents every year of any company in the world for decades.
It’s possible to beat but harder than people make it out to be. It makes so many of the really hard architectural problems “easy” (for certain definitions of the word easy that do not disallow for “and after I spin up a new instance of my app, I want to drink poison on the front lawn of IBM HQ while blasting ‘This Will End in Tears’ because the operator console is telling me to buy more MIPs but my CIO is asking when we can migrate this 40-year old pile of COBOL and HLASM to the cloud”).
Mainframes aren’t that hard. Nearly everyone who reads HN would be more than smart enough to master the environment, including the ancient languages and all the whackado OS norms like simulating punchcard outputs. But they’re also smart enough to not want to. THAT is the problem that makes elimination of the mainframe intractable. The world needs this level of built-in capability, but you have to be a bit nuts to want to touch the problem.
I have been to this hill. I can tell you I am not signing up to die on it, no matter how valuable it would be if we took the hill.
Well said! This echos my, admittedly somewhat limited, experiences as well.
I remember one mainframe I supported, there was an explosion on the same block which took out most of the buildings in the area. It was bad enough that the building which housed the mainframe was derelict. But that mainframe chugged along like nothing happened. I can't remember what hardware nor TSS it was running but I woul guarantee that none of the platforms I've supported since would have faired nearly as well (though I did have some SPARC boxes in one company that survived more than 10 years continual use and zero downtime -- they were pretty special machines too).
100% agree, but AFAIK the HW isn't doing lockstep on modern zseries. The nonstop was also HW lockstep many years ago and they converted to a checkpoint restart model, which AFAIK is the same on zos/etc with help from the "HW" which is just "software" running in the LPAR/etc.
Regardless, there have been various clustering/SSI/etc software layers designed to make windows/linux/etc behave as though it were lock stepped as well via software/hypervisor checkpoint restart.
So it is not impossible, but you don't get it out of the box because most of these applications have moved the fault tolerance into an application + database transactional model where the higher level operations aren't completed until there is a positive acknowledgment that a transaction is committed (and the DB configured for replication, logging, whatever if needed, blocks the commit until its done).
So, yes that model requires more cognitive overhead for the developer than Cobol batch jobs, which tend to be individually straightforward (or the ones i've seen the complexity is how they interact). But the results can be the same without all the fancy HW/OS layers if the DB is clustered/etc.
If there was an HN equivalent of Reddit's /r/bestof, this comment would deserve to be there. Encapsulates everything about why this problem is so hard.
I see a lot of “good” answers where good translates to reasonable business or social goals. But I can think of quite a few bad reasons.
The top reason is, management wants workers back in the office because managers never learned how to manage people, so they practice management-by-walking-around, aka interrupt-driven behavior. Many companies have a culture of MBWA, and it’s a hard curse to break.
Another bad reason is, distanced work has led to a substantial reduction in workplace unfairness behaviors such as sexual harassment and race-based favoritism. And this, logically, has made female and minority employees more valuable and better performers. But in many workplaces, favoritism is the order of the day, and women and minorities were not the favorites. The favorites are now performing worse than the people they stepped on to be unfairly promoted, and it makes incompetent executives look, well… incompetent.
Another reason is that many people, particularly executives, have more authority, respect, or control in the workplace than they do at home. For quite a few people, their office has become their primary social outlet. And taking that away has proven unlivable for them.
The other reason that immediately came to mind is that executives are, by and large, older than the rank and file, and they (we) come from a time when building, maintaining, and overseeing an office space was both a critical part of the job and a source of pride / ego. For older management, offices are still a real-world manifestation of the success of the company that signals to other people how effective the leadership of the company is. People are less able to derive the same sense of awe from abstractions like sales numbers. If people don’t return to the office, it will not continue to make economic sense to have flashy offices, and this ego outlet will disappear.
Are these good reasons? They are not. But these reasons, honestly, ring truer to me than “hallway collisions.” In the real world, all motivating reasons are self-centered reasons, and executives simply don’t benefit from hallway and breakroom magic or mentoring of the young. They do perversely benefit from showy offices, discrimination, avoiding overt displays of their lack of skill, and forced social conduct, though.
Branches exist to handle and process A) cash demands, B) check and other non-specie instruments, and C) paper for commercial clients. If they’re a community or specialty bank, branches also exist to serve the particular, unusual needs of their community,—usually business needs. These special needs often include unusual skills such as assessing the quality of a crop or meeting with specialized experts.
That branches happen to also offer convenience to consumers is a happy accident, mostly, and it’s happier in that businesspeople are themselves consumers and often select their business bank based on where they personally bank. Branches are JUSTIFIED regulatorily by their public benefit which centers, in most cases, around consumer and SMB (which is to say, prosumer) access. But like many things, the regulatory rationale and the real purpose do not fully correspond. I’m sure you’re as shocked as I.
If branches were about sourcing consumer deposits, they would be uninsurable properties, because banks would burn their branches to the ground. Rest assured.
The Author has a broad reputation around here for knowing what he is talking about, so I think 'I run banks' might need more context if you really want this to be an appeal to authority argument, especially as your HN bio doesn't support the claim that you run banks and 'running banks' isn't really a role
Well, to be fair, The Author has a broad reputation for authoritatively saying things about banking and is a HN celebrity, which does not necessarily mean he works at a bank or knows one from the inside.
I read the article, and the described model does not apply at all to countries with modern banking, e.g. for example Poland, which I know well. And this sentence: "The dominant engine for profitability of deposit accounts is net interest margin" is decidedly untrue here. Today, banks here do not want your money. What they seem to want (but I do not know this from the inside, just from observations) is a long-term relationship, so that they can sell "products" that involve fees (visible or hidden): cards, investment products from third parties, etc. Also, most modern banks have no tellers anymore here.
That is fair and an actual argument with your opinion and some evidence while to me the parent was more 'Author is wrong, opposite is true, and I have more authority'
Appeal to authority is usually annoying but I just meant that if you do it you should appeal to a higher authority which I didnt really recognise in this case.
Regardless of the author's reputation, the point does stand that branches often cater to specific needs of the locality.
For e.g. bank branches in rural areas in India often understand rural needs and work with local government administration to offer special loans that have no place in cities (like loans for water pumps, seasonal loans to fund the transport of produce to central market places, etc). In a small city that I worked in, bank branches were aware that they would get lots of account holders visiting during "lunch time" at factories. Various factories ended up collaborating with the bank branches to have different lunch times so as to reduce the load of visitors at the branch. In Industrial locations within that same city, branches unofficially specialize in small loans to help suppliers tide over payment cycles of the large customers.
In another distant suburb of Mumbai that I lived in for many years, the local bank and its branches within that suburb had higher credibility than even nationalised banks! The Bank officers would be invited to attend local industrial meetings, township planning discussions, merchant meetings, etc. They learn from the meetings, arrange for special loan and financial packages. There are business communities where reputation is everything. Such business persons sometimes do visit a branch and ensure that certain cheques by clients get honoured while they present cash or hand over their business documents for hypothecation. In many suburbs and rural areas, bank branches provide a "daily deposit" collection service where a branch officer visits various businesses in the evening to collect cash for deposit into the current account. These are not part of the banks' official services, but are arrangements and accomodations made at local levels.
As an erstwhile small business owner, I had learned at a very young age of the importance of having a great working relationship with the local branch officers (tellers, other officers, the branch manager). We would invite them to events at our business, and they would attend, too.
My examples are all from specific regions in India that I have stayed in, but I do think that other parts of India as well as in the world (including in the US) would have specialised needs that an "online" presence would not adequately cater to.
Originally they existed because nothing was computerised.
You went to your bank (and it was just that one physical bank) because that's where the definitive paper record of how much of the money in the bank was yours was kept. You also had a bank book, your copy of that record. Every time you went to a teller for a deposit or a withdrawal the teller would go to the bank's file storage, remove your record and update it, and your bank book to match the transaction, then return the record to the file storage.
If you moved town, or across town you applied to the bank to have your records moved.
Your checks (if you live in a country that still uses them) had your branch number on them, banks would reconcile checks using that info so they could update those all important file folders.
How do the three things you listed make money for the bank? I thought withdrawing cash (maybe by (A) you mean originating loans?) and handling checks are offered at no charge by most banks as a loss-leader/because of regulations. I don’t really know what your (C) is.
Perhaps another thing is maybe the OP is mostly talking about massive banks in the United States with many branches and you’re talking about smaller credit unions or community banks which make money in different ways? That might explain why you might both talk about ‘banks’ while both being right and yet talking about totally different businesses.
Both, parent and author, are right ( in a qualified way ). The issue that I have with it is that the article attempts to generalize a little too much. There is definitely a business model built around selling ( opening accounts ) for retail customers and it is sufficiently common for a lot of locations in US, but it hardly the only one. Not to search very far, Chicago banking market is extra weird and congested so it requires some banks to specialize, which results in some boutique banks, which focus on markets other than pure retail.
Both you and the author, while correct about many details, are completely wrong about the business model and economics of retail branch banking.
To be precise you are off by 100x or two orders of magnitude on the profitability of depositors to the branch. What you both missed is the biggest open secret in banking - the fractional reserve model.
Fractional reserve references the fact that banks don’t merely loan out depositor funds at a 3-5% spread. Instead they are required to keep at most 3% of depositor funds on—hand while they loan out the other 97% at a very profitable spread between interest charged on loans and interest paid to depositors.
For this reason every $1000 taken in by a branch allows them to make on average $97,000 in new loans. They pay the depositor 1% in interest on the $1000 deposit while charging 4-7% interest on approximately $97,000 in loans for a rough profit of almost $3,000-$6,000 for every $1000 deposited. Where does the $97,000 come from? It comes in the form of bank credit - literally numbers added in the bank’s computer.
This is one of the mechanisms of money creation. The other being sourced by the Federal Reserve when they purchase securities on the open market with money they create out of thin air. This is also what causes inflation, despite what politicians wish you to believe.
Banks do not operate as non-profits. They wouldn’t operate retail branches unless the economics warrant it, which they very much do.
That’s not actually how real banks work though - “fractional reserve” is only an economic textbook model.
Most countries don’t, and have never had reserve requirements. The limits to lending are firstly capital (share capital, retained earnings etc.), which banking regulations allow banks to lever up to a certain level, and secondarily liquidity, which they need to be able to pay out withdrawals, transfers etc. Deposits don’t come into it apart from that they are a certain kind of cheap liquidity for inter-bank transfers.
Deposits themselves are a liability of the bank, and since lending creates new deposits on the balance sheet, “lending from deposits” would create more liabilities from existing liabilities, which doesn’t really work with the accounting.
I’ll admit my Google Foo is currently failing me but when last I checked fractional reserve requirements were a very real requirement up until the last couple of years.
Do you have a source to support your claim that they only apply in economic textbook theory and not in reality.
Could you perhaps help explain, ideally with a numerical example, how it currently works in practice?
> "Money creation in practice differs from some popular misconceptions — banks do not act simply as intermediaries, lending out deposits that savers place with them, and nor do they ‘multiply up’ central bank money to create new loans and deposits."
As Keen explains from accounting first principles, fractional reserve could work if banks gave out loans in cash, but not how modern banks work today.
What I'm referring to about capital is formalised in the Basel III regulations - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel_III - since we've established that banks don't lend out of deposits, they actually have to cover any delinquent loans from their tier-1 capital (shareholder's equity) - that's what they're leveraging when they lend, not deposits. I can attest to this myself - I've never heard of any bank saying "oh sorry, we couldn't make any more loans because we needed to wait for some more people to make deposits", but as a bank shareholder I have more than once had a letter saying "we need to raise more capital through a new share offering tranche or else our lending projections show we may not be able to meet our capital adequacy ratios" (especially around the time when things were transitioning from Basel II to Basel III because the ratios increased).
Notably all other countries have a similar fractional reserve banking model even if the details may vary. Specifically, the money loaned out by the bank is created out of thin air in the form of bank credit and does not come out of any account. The banks in every country have no cost of goods for the money they lend out. They are authorized by government charter to create this money out of thin air. This is true whether they have reserve requirements or not.
I am afraid you are misunderstanding the situation.
First, government authorisation is irrelevant. Shadow banking has the same effects. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banking_system And so do grey or black market operations. Or offshore banks (that don't fall under the local government's authorisation.)
Second, even in the absence of any minimum legal reserve requirements, why do banks need reserves at all? Among other uses, banks need reserves for two main reasons:
* Cash withdrawals
* Net settling of money transfers with other banks
Now you are right that a bank can in principle create a loan/deposit pair out of thin air: they just adjust their ledger that you have now have 100$ dollars in your current account, but also that you owe them a 100$. Voila: money from nothing.
Now here's the problem: debtors are seldom content to let the loaned funds gather dust in their accounts. Typically, they spend them. Either by withdrawing cash or by transferring the money to some other person's account.
Chances are that the other person's account is with a different bank.
Both the withdrawal and the transfer diminish the reserves of our bank.
(On the flip side: both cash deposits and your customers receiving a money transfer into their account, increases your bank's reserves.)
In summary: yes, in the instant of creation, loans create money out of thin air. But as soon as the debtor spends the loaned funds, reserves (and thus deposits) are required.
And that's why even in the absence of legal reserve requirements, banks have to attract deposits.
How does your model explain that reserve requirements are now 0%? Why haven’t the banks created infinite money?
The loanable funds model that you describe is no longer accurate (though it is still taught by courses using outdated textbooks, e.g. the classic “Macroeconomics” by Mankiw. Newer textbooks, e.g. Core Econ do not teach the loanable funds model. It is incompatible with empirical data.
I simplified for the sake of the audience since it does, I’m sure you would agree, seem absurd that the current reserve requirements are near 0% which only makes my argument stronger. Technically, though the reserve requirements are still >0%. There are limits as exhibited by other required ratios that must still be preserved. But effectively with near 0% reserve, the benefits of holding deposits are only amplified.[0]
I’m mainly arguing against the idea that banks take in money as deposits and lend out that same money as loans. In modern economies, this is not actually how it works (Though it used to be true! Just not anymore.)
“Money creation in practice differs from some popular misconceptions — banks do not act simply as intermediaries, lending out deposits that savers place with them, and nor do they ‘multiply up’ central bank money to create new loans and deposits”
I highly recommend reading the whole paper from The Bank of England, it shows that much of what is taught in outdated macro textbooks is wrong.
This article has always bugged me because I get hung up here:
> When a bank makes a loan, for example
to someone taking out a mortgage to buy a house, it does not
typically do so by giving them thousands of pounds worth of
banknotes. Instead, it credits their bank account with a bank
deposit of the size of the mortgage.
That's certainly not how it worked for me in the US. My bank account went down dramatically in the process of buying a house because I had to wire the down payment to an escrow company, and the bank gave either the escrow company or seller the rest of the funds (I assume, I had no visibility into the process. But at no point did me-as-borrower get an increase in my deposits!
Is that super meaningful? I wouldn't think so, except for that if the seller wants cash, or wants to deposit that money in a different bank (or puts it into the stock market, or whatever) then it requires my lending bank to have something other than just numbers in their own internal database - they have to convince that other institution that they're good for the money they just lent out. And that's the part where I'd assume consumer deposits would come back into play - unless the banks have another source of currency on hand.
Think of a car loan, then, in which case the bank can just increment the number in your deposit account (until you spend it on a car).
The bit of information your second paragraph alludes to is the fact that all banks have accounts at the Federal Reserve. The Fed has the single database that the banks use to clear with each other. And the Fed and other regularity agencies audit the banks to make sure their internal databases are consistent, their loans are backed by assets of sufficient quality, etc.
Something to note is that in the US (and most modern economies), the federal government creates a 1:1 exchange rate between private bank money (e.g. money created through loans) and central bank money (numbers in the Fed database and physical cash) via deposit insurance (e.g. FDIC in the US).
Sure, though it's rare that you'd borrow money without intending it to leave the bank (cases like paying off higher-interest stuff with lower-interest borrowing aside), but that aside, yeah, all the bits about how the banks have to have their accounts reconciled with the Fed and backing assets and all is really the core of my disagreement with the "banks can basically just print money infinitely" claims. Which I've sometimes seen people cite that BoE article as support of leaning on that "they just add a number in their computer when you take out a loan" bit. If it were that simple, I'd love to just make myself a bank and print myself some money, after all. ;)
My understanding is also that these discussions of "money" ignore things like investments or non-liquid assets, which I think is another big source of fuzziness. E.g. borrowing against other assets, including stock, that might have appreciated incredibly rapidly which gives you more purchasing power (the ability to "spend more money") without requiring anyone else to actually have given you money for anything specific.
See the part of my comment about the Fed and other entities regulating that the bank has claims on assets of sufficient quality. So the banks can’t just totally create loans willy nilly. They liabilities must be matched by assets of sufficient quality.
This does not preclude, however, asset bubbles as we saw in Japan in 1991 and globally in 2008. The banks create loans which drives up the price of assets. Those assets, now appearing to be worth more, enable the banks to create bigger loans, because hey, the asset is worth more! This is a positive feedback loop and a major failure mode of this system. Regulation tries to tamp it down but does not always succeed.
> My understanding is also that these discussions of "money" ignore things like investments or non-liquid assets, which I think is another big source of fuzziness.
It definitely is. When central banks think of the money supply, they take into account different aggregate which are sorted by liquidity.
There’s no reason (other than cost and your current wealth and bank risk management) why you couldn’t get a personal loan for the full purchase price of the house, and pay the seller the cash price. You’d then see your bank account balance go up by the house’s cost, withdraw the cash and then pay the seller.
I’m not sure what bank would give a normal person that kind of money unsecured but you could secure it with e.g. another house you own. Most people don’t have a spare house, so the banks optimise the process for the everyday scenario where the buyer doesn’t need to see their bank balance go up. But money is still being created in there somewhere
> I’m mainly arguing against the idea that banks take in money as deposits and lend out that same money as loans.
We are in full agreement on this point. Banks never lend out even a fraction of depositor funds. Instead, they have been given a monopoly right by the government to create bank credit as a money equivalent out of thin air.
If you or I did this it would be considered fraud but when banks do it, it is legal.
> How does your model explain that reserve requirements are now 0%?
> Why haven’t the banks created infinite money?
Reserve requirements are not the only constraint limiting bank’s ability to lend. The banks are also limited by the number of qualified borrowers who are seeking a loan. Qualified borrowers must have sufficient collatoral and/or income coverage to service the loan as well as a need to borrow funds. Banks can’t sell more loans than qualified borrowers are buying.
You’re claiming banks make 5k in profit for every 1k in deposits. Chase has 2.3 trillion in deposits. Why don’t they have 10+ trillion in annual profits?
Chase is limited in that they can only lend to well-qualified borrowers who wish to borrow from Chase on terms Chase deems sufficiently profitable.
In other words they are limited by the demand for loans by well-qualified borrowers. Well qualified is defined as borrowers with sufficient collatoral, income/debt, and credit history.
I think you're making a different point than the original article. Yes, retail banks operate in an economically profitable way. But that's not to say that branches are required. There are retail banks without any branches. They can still do all the lending you mention. The author is attempting to answer the question of why those haven't put the ones that spend money on branches out of business. He also alludes at a followup around "semi-public infrastructure deployed as commercial real estate projects which are funded by private capital."
However: "Instead they are required to keep at most 3% of depositor funds on—hand while they loan out the other 97% at a very profitable spread between interest charged on loans and interest paid to depositors."
So if you bring in $1000 a 3% requirement means $30, and you can lend $970. Where do you get $97,000? Say the bank wants to loan money to home purchasers. "Numbers added in a bank computer" aren't gonna pay the bills for the people on the other side of those home purchases who are going to want cash or money in their own bank, not just yours.
Are you assuming a recursive process? Lend $970, have it redeposited by the person the borrower pays, lend out another $940, etc? But that only works if the money keeps getting redeposited at which point it's not entirely fair to characterize that as the "original" deposit only, and my understanding is that that's the (somewhat hypothetical) "money multiplier" which I've always seen as 1/r which would be 33x for 3% not 97x anyway. And in practice, that doesn't get reached.
Well… I read it. And I’ve gotta say, that sounds like a blatant violation of Regulation Y, the requirement that bank holding companies engage only in, “The business of banking.” There are lots and lots of activities that fall under that umbrella, but enterprise B2B software sales isn’t one of them.
CapOne may be too big to fail, but it’s not too big to receive a C
>> “ Regulation Y also describes transactions for which bank holding companies must seek and receive the Federal Reserve’s approval.”
My reading of Reg Y is if Capital One got approval from the Fed, it’s fine for them as a bank holding company to engage in a nonbanking activity. Am I missing something?
Capital One Bank (USA) N.A. — Currently offers a wide variety of credit card products, other lending products, and deposit products.
Capital One, N.A. — Offers a broad spectrum of banking products and financial services to consumers, small businesses, and commercial clients, including traditional banking products through an extensive branch network in Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Louisiana, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Texas, and Virginia.
Capital One Auto Finance, Inc. — Offers automobile financing products.
Oh wow, that made me feel old. I actually read that article just before making the switch from the Radio Shack TRS-80 ecosystem to Commodore. See the Tussey ad for a 64C with an FSD-2 floppy? I bought that package from them with a repackaged c.Itoh thermal printer. It actually had the mail-in redemption offer the Commodore guy referred to in the article.
It felt like I had that C64 forever. I learned CBM BASIC, 6502 assembler, and even K
I did see that but just wasn’t sure as I remember Compute! being more general purpose and I guess never realized they had offshoots oriented to specific platforms
No, COMPUTE!'s Gazette was not C64 specific. It covered all the Commodore 8-bit home systems: VIC-20, C64, Commodore 16/Plus/4, C128. It started with the VIC-20 and C64 as that is all there was, and in the end it only covered C64/128. The C64 was certainly the only model the Gazette covered during its entire lifetime.
Goodness, Rexx. I’m pretty sure I got the job at IBM when I was a kid because I already knew Rexx on the 390, ARexx on the Amiga, and the OS/2 version. I also knew HLASM and ia32 assembler, so I was instantly useful with no further training.
During US v Microsoft, I was in the middle of writing a brief to the court arguing that the solution to Microsoft’s monopoly was not to split the OS from the application groups, but rather to disallow Microsoft from publishing its own compilers anymore. Because, you see, then they would be forced to have fully documented OS calling structures, because they would have to communicate them to the compiler vendors. In spite of their weakened state at the time, IBM would have gladly bought Microsoft’s dev tools groups, dooming them thoroughly as they attempted to merge them into the VisualAge group (née CSet).
I always believed the net effect of this would be that Microsoft would suddenly have to do an about face and support one of the OSS compiler chains, probably GCC. At the time, they had a current Mach-compiled version of Windows that was still being maintained, and odds are Windows—not MacOS—would have been the ascendant Mach-based OS, because MS would have lost a lot of its ability to fix its problems by losing control of its dev chain. They’d need more radical abstraction than the NT kernel was giving them at the time. Because it was still a branch from OS/2 1.2 which was… special and half-baked. (It’s important to remember that Linux was still considered a toy by most—the “serious” OSS OS was still BSD. And if you had real workloads you ran Solaris, even though you knew Sun was somehow going to doom themselves. The world then looks nothing like the world now.)
This really would have obviated the need for Apple to sell to Sun. Instead, MS would never have made the rescue investment, Sun would continue to skitter off the rails, and Apple would have sold to… I dunno, probably someone weird like Sony. Remember them? Because MS going to Mach would have poisoned the shift from Copeland to NeXTStep… the world barely wanted one Mach-based OS, much less two. One neat side effect, though, is we would have probably seen something a lot like WSL back in 2000 or so. Because the Mach Win build took much more advantage of the OS “personalities” features than MacOS did.
Back then, all of this mattered a lot, because things were far less elegant than they are now. It’s hard to imagine how far we came in the intervening 25 years. So very far.
But in the middle of writing that brief, Judge Jackson shot his stupid mouth off, and I was like, “Welp, nobody’s getting split up now.” And I put it in my archive of good ideas that aren’t gonna happen.
So no, I don’t think there was ever a real scenario where Sun bought Apple.
Perhaps you could try reading the timeline's account of U.S. v. Microsoft, the three parts of which are present on the first and second pages of the link.
I still have a Model 100. It replaced the one I had in high school. It has, by far, the most comfortable keyboard I’ve ever used on a laptop. My typing speed on it approaches the speed I can reach on a Model M mechanical keyboard.
There’s still a very active community around the 100, and there are a few old hardware guys who still make new expansions for it. Recently there’s even a CP/M board for it which means it can run a lot of apps like WordStar, making it very useful day-to-day. It’s a nice, distraction-free environment.
Remember how standardized tests require you to use a “#2” pencil? That’s an HB pencil (approximately) in the standardized scale. Because it lays down a specific amount of graphite. If you use a harder pencil, it won’t, and you’d fail the test.
Nowadays we do drafting on the computer, but back in the pencil-and-paper days, I remember getting trained on using, for instance, a very hard (7-9H) lead to predraw my figures and put in guide and horizon rays, and then go in later with, say, a 2B to darken up only the real lines. Then finish with drafting powder (eraser shavings, basically) to wipe out the light lines.
Needless to say, even with graphite, harder ones didn’t lay down what you’d call an acceptable line.
