Yeah it was over 30 years ago. I’m sure with more experience it might have been easier conceptually. I didn’t have any trouble with COBOL but found the whole mainframe environment to be rigid, crusty, and difficult to understand and use compared to the Unix systems I had used in school.
Weeeellll... yes and no. You aren't wrong, but I would just note that mainframes were remarkably reliable. They pushed a lot of boundaries on things that we still kinda struggle with today in terms of data integrity, redundancy, hot-swapability, recovery, etc. No question that today's systems are faster and perhaps in some ways more affordable. Definitely the case that the average person wanting to learn about software has more resources and tools available that once upon a time required access to these multi-million dollar machines. But, there's definitely tradeoffs between those centralized systems and our distributed systems of today.
No they are not just beefy servers. Their raw processing power is not remarkable. They are built for throughput. I/O and peripherals are handled by separate hardware so the CPU only deals with data in memory. They also have more sophisticated virtualization and scalability features than standard servers or PCs.
