Stewart Alsop, editor for Infoworld magazine in the 1990s eating his words, "Death to the Mainframe," 2001 (Computer History Museum)

I came across a blog post (Wayback Machine link) discussing the 50th anniversary of the IBM System/360, and it mentioned a prediction about the so-called “death of the mainframe.”

I had seen the photo before, of Stewart Alsop literally eating his words “Death to the Mainframe” with a knife and fork, but I had not seen the original quote in print, and I couldn’t find a citation.

Back issues of InfoWorld magazine are online at Google Books, but searches there were not helpful. I kept finding references to the prediction, but not the original statement itself.

Then I happened across this forum discussion about the “Death of the Mainframe” on Google Groups, and one of the members noted that the original statement did not happen in the InfoWorld magazine, but at a conference.

The first reference in print to the death of the mainframe by Alsop is in the February 22, 1993 issue of InfoWorld magazine on page 4. The article reads:

Last week, we held the second InfoWorld Editorial EXPOsure, where 35 vendors from the Northwest showed hot new products to 26 of our editors and reporters and more than 70 of our readers (plus an odd assortment of other insiders and cognoscenti).

We also had a fun panel featuring columnists Cheryl Currid and Brian Livingston, along with four of our staff. The panel gave a lively discussion about the role of the mainframe in future information systems. I predicted that the last mainframe will be unplugged on March 15, 1996. Cheryl Currid was a little kinder and predicted that all remaining mainframes will blow up on December 31, 1999, when their clocks cannot figure out how to make the change to the year 2000.

Infosec magazine article image
Alsop predicted (jokingly, as I read it) that the last mainframe would be unplugged in 1996 - InfoWorld, February 22, 1993.

Reference for the magazine article:
Alsop, Stewart. “Microsoft’s Hermes: key network management system or myth?” Distributed Thinking, InfoWorld magazine. February 22, 1993. page 4. (article available on Google Books)

(Revised and republished March 30th, 2025)