At least if you went with IBM and followed the old adage “no one ever got fired for buying IBM” in the 80s, you can still buy new supported hardware to run your old code on. If you went with their competitors, not so much.
The people who designed their systems such that they could be easily transitioned off of IBM have done so long ago. Those systems now run exponentially cheaper and have access to more resources.
Vendor lock-in was just as much of a problem then as now.
Yes because people in the 80s writing COBOL were writing AbstractFactorySingletonBeans to create a facade to make their transitions to newer platforms easier....
Well, our next iSeries is a whole lot cheaper than our current iSeries and quite a bit more powerful. The Power 9 is not something I would call a dinosaur.
