NASA have just ended an era with the flick of a switch, where they powered down NASA's last mainframe, the IBM Z9 Mainframe, at their Marshall Space Flight Center.

Of course, mainframes were a cornerstone of NASA's history. They could be attributed to getting the U.S. to land on the Moon, or to calculate many other things that the public is allowed to know, and more interestingly, the things we don't know. Which I'm sure NASA have a lot of.

Back when NASA were installing older mainframes, they used to be absolutely gigantic. Now we can have them down to the size of a decently-sized refrigerator (if that makes you feel any better about NASA's power bills or the state of "global warming"). It's a sad day, but it was an eventuality.