As Appearing in LinuxPlanet, February 23, 2000. This was one of the first widely-read articles about running Linux on IBM mainframes, and its success helped to launch a major career change for me.

Linux Everywhere: More Than Just a Slogan

Let's play a word association game, shall we? The first word is "mainframe."

Many Linux enthusiasts were born and bred in an era of PCs that are fast and getting faster, cheap and getting cheaper. When you can buy a two-way Alpha box for five thousand dollars, or a high-end Intel for even less, even administrators of large-scale servers are reluctant to spend seven figures on Big Iron from Big Blue. Besides, there's that whole legacy thing going on - you know, COBOL and RPG and punch cards. So when you saw that word "mainframe" there's a good chance that some of the words that came to mind were: expensive, cumbersome, proprietary, obsolete, DINOSAUR.

You would be wrong on the first four words, but right about that last one: dinosaur. You were probably thinking of a lumbering, walnut-brained lummox like Brontosaurus, though. Wrong dinosaur. Instead, try Tyrannosaurus Rex. Mainframes today are like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park: they're back, and they're pissed!

Wait a minute - T. Rex is not quite right, either. Let's say, a herd of forty thousand raptors. Later in this article, you will understand why.