10th Anniversary of Linux for the Mainframe: Beginning to Today - Linux and Open Source from eWeek
That was an interesting read and informative.
Some parts brought a smile to my face … for example this quote:
To get potential customers interested in Linux for the mainframe (in 2000, Linux on x86 was in its infancy) before the official release of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for S/390, IBM and SUSE held a two-week-long install party.
I moved to Red Hat Linux in 1998, and used Red Hat from 1998 to 2001. I confess relative to Win98/XP (at the time) I did not consider Red Hat to be in its “infancy”. To me at the time “infancy” referred to my old Apple II+ or the CP/M OS I had running on that Apple. But I guess its all relative, and in 50 years people will look back on how the Operating Systems of today were in their “infancy”.
It was also interesting to see how the mainframe market surived and indeed thrived, by adopting an operating system (and also the applications) from the PC market.
I recall in the early 1990’s, some of the engineers and scientist who I worked with were excited about Linux, because it was close enough to Unix, that they could take engineer/scientific applications that they had developed at the office/university on main frame / mini-computers (running Unix) and recompile them at home on a PC running Linux. This scientific/engineer link from mainframe/mini-Unit to PC-Linux was a real benefit to Linux.
And then less than 10 years later, the opposite was true. The applications (and operating system) that now ran on a PC with Linux, were now able to be moved to mainframes (which now had Linux) and were running on mainframes. …
Life is full of fascinating curves.