Tcl/Tk was the first "grown up" language I used after using variants of BASIC up until the mid to late nineties. I bought a used Sun Ultra 1 and Tcl/Tk was like a vision of the future compared to BASIC.

I still sort of want to use it again, but can't quite find a reason to do so.

Fujitsu replaced their SPARC CPUs with ARM, I think they were pretty good, but last I read about them was a few years ago.

Fujitsu is developing new ARM based CPUs called Monaka, but their focus seems to be HPC and AI, no mention of "normal" servers

A Fujitsu ARM Server for normal people that I can buy through a normal retail channel and boot a freakin' generic Linux ISO... that would be great!

(Yes, I'm aware of Ampere Altra. The space desperately needs competition and commoditization, imho.)

The funny thing is that Fujitsu has a sizable enterprise IT business, and their Primergy servers are very good, so why don't they offer their own ARM CPUs?

The previous A64fx was just for HPC. Monaka looks more general purpose so maybe they will sell Monaka servers.

A man can dream...

I think "Code was never the hardest part" is more fair.

Code itself can absolutely be difficult, but it's seldom the most difficult part of a project. Generally the hard part is actually figuring out what you want, and how to achieve what you want, then the actual code is pretty straightforward in most cases.

I've been programming since the the 1980s and I'm not insulted by the idea that code isn't the hard part.

Yes. I've also heard it said "code was never the bottleneck"

It seems to me that some companies are looking to move off COBOL and mainframes to say Linux and Java, because that is what someone was employed to do, not because it's necessarily a good idea.

I think COBOL systems would be plenty maintainable if the owners of the systems invested in maintaining them. If companies just let people retire, attempt to hire replacements with unremarkable salaries, then maintenance is a problem.

If they paid salaries that reflected how critical this work is, I don't think it would be that big a problem to find and keep good developers.

We have critical economic infrastructure being treated as annoyance and a cost centre.

I firmly believe that any thoughtful rewrite is good. Most companies just don't have resources for that. At least, it serves as a security review, but also refreshes team knowledge of the system. They usually also improve documentation if it was wrong.

I think there has probably always been gaps between what marketing wants to sell, what management wants to prioritise, what programmers want to make, what customers say they want, and what customers actually want.

Those gaps are getting bigger all over the place, technical users generally just want all the bullshit to go away and just have a reliable and simple system, but no mainstream software companies want to sell it.

Realistically only macOS runs on Macs, Linux worked on the early M series but not later models, as far as I know.

In Australia, it wouldn't even need to be a used PC. The Steam Machine is $1600 AUD here, you can get a brand new gaming PC for that. Not a particularly amazing machine of course, but you can walk into a shop and buy it right now.

Made me think of Breadbox Ensemble, which is GEOS, and was really lovely.

FWIW, still around and now FOSS.

https://github.com/bluewaysw/pcgeos

Oh, we had an "enthusiast" customer back around the turn of the century who swore by this and NetZero.

Microsoft is still doing fine, sir.

Free OS updates is the norm now though. If you'd bought a Windows PC 7 years ago, or used Linux, or just about any other desktop OS, you'd have had free updates.

I guess you forgot about windows TPM controversy. Comments like this make me realize a good majority have no idea what they are talking about and still decide to voice an uninformed opinion.