Even worse, many of the computers with this bug are the mainframes used primarily by big corporations and governments–just think what could happen to social security and medicare.
Mr. Kirschenbaum has collected anecdotes about people writing poetry on mainframes, using the line-editing tools programmers normally used to debug code, before the invention of PCs in the 1970s.
He also argues that processing this data in place on the mainframes using these tools is much more cost-effective and practical than it would be to move the same data to the cloud.
WHEN working as a clerk in the early 1990s for Antonin Scalia, a Supreme Court Justice, a twenty-something law graduate became frustrated by the limitations of the creaking mainframe technology used by the court to publish its rulings a system called Atex that is well known to veteran journalists.
That may be true, but it's all too similar to what mainframe manufacturers used to say about desktop machines.
"CSC was able to help e-Steel's web-centric system talk to the legacy and mainframe computers used by many of e-Steel's clients," Hanan says.
For example, the microprocessor was hailed as the solution to the world's energy problems after all, one 8086 had all the power of an IBM mainframe, but used a comparatively infinitesimal amount of electricity.
The computation needed to run the algorithms now fits in tiny embedded processors, which are more powerful computationally than the entire mainframes we used a generation ago.
Rather, he predicted, wrongly, that in the future everyone would have a relatively simple and inexpensive computer terminal in the home linked to a shared, centralized mainframe and use it as an electronic portal to the worlds of commerce and news and entertainment media.
Even some longtimeIBM mainframe accounts use Sun when they buy new gear to run budding ventures on-line.
