dinosaurs mating

Said to occur when yet another {big iron} merger or buyout occurs; originally reflected a perception by hackers that these signal another stage in the long, slow dying of the {mainframe} industry. In the mainframe industry's glory days of the 1960s, it was `IBM and the Seven Dwarfs': Burroughs, Control Data, General Electric, Honeywell, NCR, RCA, and Univac. RCA and GE sold out early, and it was `IBM and the Bunch' (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, and Honeywell) for a while. Honeywell was bought out by Bull; Burroughs merged with Univac to form Unisys (in 1984 -- this was when the phrase dinosaurs mating was coined); and in 1991 AT&T absorbed NCR (but spat it back out a few years later). Control Data still exists but is no longer in the mainframe business. In similar wave of dinosaur-matings as the PC business began to consolidate after 1995, Digital Equipment was bought by Compaq which was bought by Hewlett-Packard. More such earth-shaking unions of doomed giants seem inevitable.

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