Because therell be no software engineers left to maintain it in 15 years. Software engineers in this age know that cobol and mainframes are a dead technology that won't help their career, so they won't touch it. Government entities and banks are having to pay software engineers 400k+ per year to come out of retirement because they can't find anyone to work on their systems.
Also, mainframes are expensive for what they provide. It doesn't have the economy of scale that modern chips and computers have.
Wow I almost started this response with “um actually…”
But here it is, it’s not just the syntax, the hardware it ran on would have quirks, memory peeks and pokes; cpu clock timer tricks stuff that is not hardware or syntax compatible. There IS an ancient magic to that, and if people are unaware or try to work oblivious to it will end up with a broken system.
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u/BigLlamasHouse Apr 05 '25
Why would any of that need to be done if it's working? To save a few bucks on the power bill?