Post #1109311

2026-04-12 08:54 UTC

Reading about @pluralistic &quot;Tron-pilled&quot; concept, it links with a though I had recently. Tron was based on the obsolete concept of mainframes, with Master Control server owning all the work and users using just a dumb terminal to access their code. An era that ended with the PC giving power to users. Now, with AI, streaming, cloud computing, GPU/RAM hoarding, datacenters… It is just an scheme to return to the mainframe concept for modern times. You own nothing. Companies control/own all again.

Replies (9)

@celeduc@mastodon.social 2026-04-12 09:15

@danielgibert@mastodon.online @pluralistic@mamot.fr it explains why many of the "agentic coding platforms" are styled as MCPs

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@cybervegan@autistics.life 2026-04-12 09:40

@danielgibert@mastodon.online @pluralistic@mamot.fr We never really left the mainframe era. There were certainly less players in the field, but IBM has never stopped making mainstreams and mini computers - they are still used heavily by banks, government and commerce. And the big five tech corps have basically recreated mainframes out of clusters of pc servers and fast networks - it's basically the same architecture as you find inside a mainframes, but on a much later scale. That Master Control Program is just called something like Kubernetes (Greek for Captain) or Terraform or Docker.

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@shelldozer@oldbytes.space 2026-04-12 09:45

@danielgibert@mastodon.online @pluralistic@mamot.fr Some of us have been through that particular 360-degree cycle on multiple seperate "new technology" occasions, already. It's not a one-off about-face, it's a perpetual roundabout.

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@larsmb@mastodon.online 2026-04-12 10:18

@danielgibert@mastodon.online @pluralistic@mamot.fr There's a back and forth there that has happened repeatedly over the decades and I suspect the pendulum will swing the other way again as well. The balance shifts depending on the political situation and engineering trade-offs.

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@RupertReynolds@hachyderm.io 2026-04-12 10:21

@danielgibert@mastodon.online @pluralistic@mamot.fr If IMA Bank used a mainframe, they had a team dedicated to doing good things for IMA Bank. If they outsource to Gargoyle cloud services, those services don't care about IMA Bank any more than they do about AN Other Bank. And not at all, if they have bigger clients. It's like "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company" all over again. Mainframes are WAY better and I've put my money where my mouth is literally, with my personal accounts on a 1970s MVS 3.8j (effectively "Open Source") running on Hercules. It doesn't sell me. It doesn't lose my stuff, or go offline. It doesn't hold my data to ransome, to prevent me from leaving if I want to. It doesn't flood me with adverts. It just does the thing.

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@jguillaumes@mastodont.cat 2026-04-12 12:30

@danielgibert@mastodon.online @pluralistic@mamot.fr except actual mainframes are more efficient.

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@falken@qoto.org 2026-04-12 12:40

@danielgibert@mastodon.online @pluralistic@mamot.fr the pendulum from distributed to central compute has swung many times and will continue to do so

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@licho@kolektiva.social 2026-04-12 13:50

@danielgibert@mastodon.online mainframe as a concept never died. "Cloud" is essentially the same concept, moving the resources from the client and cloud has been a buzz word for a decade already @pluralistic@mamot.fr

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@gimulnautti@mastodon.green 2026-04-13 04:22

@danielgibert@mastodon.online Yeah. I’ve been saying the same for years. OpenAI is the new IBM!

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