On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 15:09:22 -0700, rbowman wrote:

There must still be money in big iron which is where IBM always was most
comfortable.

I worked with a guy from Boulder in the early 90s and he said
mainframes were going to become file servers, nothing more nothing
less. That is pretty much what IBM sells now. We call it the cloud
these days but it is pretty much what the Boulder, Raleigh, Atlanta
and the other big IBM data hubs were then.
Once we had PCs on our desk I found it a lot easier to log onto VM,
use SQL/DB2 to cherry pick a dataset, download it and use dBase to
actually crunch my numbers. It seemed faster even on a 20m 386 and the
dBase language was more powerful than SQL.
I was running pure DOS on an OS/2 (hardware) machine so I had 12 meg
of RAM to spare. I could load my whole dataset in RAM and crunch it
there. That really screams.