Why Apple is betting on HTML5: a web history

The article contains a disturbing number of typos, but is pretty good overall. I particularly liked this description of the late 1990’s browser wars:

With Netscape and Microsoft racing to outdo each other in unique features, the glacial pace of the sausage-making deliberation on how to best implement HTML as an interoperable standard began to run aground. The bottom of the barrel was reached with Netscape’s BLINK tag, which Microsoft matched in silliness with its own MARQUEE tag; both unplugged HTML from the goal of delivering serious documentation presentation and instead targeted the web at replicating the garish desperation of gaudy neon signs in a red light district.

That pretty much nails it.

Mainframe emulator goes commercial

Roger Bowler – the creator of the open source Hercules mainframe emulator – has put together a company called TurboHercules to try to commercialize the decade-old program that he created as a “programmer’s plaything.”

Rather than go straight at the IBM mainframe base, which many a company has tried to do and ended up in court, TurboHercules is taking an oblique angle of attack on the mainframe base, positioning a commercialized version of the Hercules mainframe emulator as a platform for disaster recovery machine for working mainframes and their software stacks. So, if you are reading this, Cravath, Swaine, and Moore, IBM’s New York lawyers, this is not about replacing existing mainframes, but about giving their software a place to run when the mainframe crashes. (I didn’t think that happened…)

…

But all the modern mainframe platforms – z/OS, z/VSE, and z/VM – have license restrictions that do not allow for customers who have versions of the code running on real mainframes to load that software atop Hercules – except for one provision in the IBM software license agreement, according to Miller, that allows for mainframe shops to load their software onto another machine in the event that the box on which it is licensed fails.

This is why TurboHercules is positioning itself as a provider of x64 and Itanium platforms suitable as emergency backup boxes for modern mainframes. Not as a box for supporting legacy (but not ancient) mainframe operating systems or new ones, but rather as a poor man’s disaster recovery for a state or local government, for instance, that these days does not have the budget to buy two System z10 BC mainframes, much less one, but is sitting on older System/390 or zSeries mainframe iron and nonetheless needs some kind of disaster recovery iron if this old kit kicks the bit bucket.

That usage scenario is eerily similar to a mainframe shop I’m somewhat familiar with.