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.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {mainframe}]