I work in a mainframe as part of my daily job. It’s one of my favorite things. Intensely powerful, can shuffle through thousands of records of data in an instant.

It’s expensive to run, and likely could be replaced with a modern application… but that high availability, high parallelism, and ‘built-in’ handling of resource scheduling to avoid deadlocks and other multitasking worries is hard to beat.

There’s a reason it’s stuck around. And while it’s annoyingly proprietary and in most cases still means you’re in the green screen terminals, it’s just a powerful tool.