I’ve never worked with major enterprise or government systems where there’s aging mainframes — the type that get parodied for running COBOL. So, I’m completely ignorant, although fascinated. Are they power hogs? Are they wildly cheap to run? Are they even run as they were back in the day?
Newer systems are way more power efficient than those of yester-year. Systems design and engineering, while built on the principles of the past, have very much changed just in the last decade alone. Older mainframe systems are really no better than museum pieces and technological curiosities today.
Are those older systems largely virtualized now? When you hear about some old system at a government office not being able to keep up, is it the same hardware?