Why won't you DIE?! IBM's S/360 and its legacy at 50 • The Register

Excerpt from an extensive mainframe market profile; also see IBM Announces "System 360" Computer Family (Computer History Museum)

"Fifty years after the first S/360 was announced and 30 years after the rise of distributed systems that were supposed to replace them, the mainframe is smaller in market share, but its principles are being embraced once again.

Google and Facebook run tens of thousands of distributed x86 servers but these servers are clustered, use fast networking and virtualisation and are managed centrally to ensure near-continuous uptime of mission-critical tasks.

Searches on Google and status updates on Facebook are the new mission-critical: back in the day a "mission critical" was ERP and payroll."

Why won't you DIE?! IBM's S/360 and its legacy at 50 • The Register