What do the IBM Z Mainframe and Ancient Freemasonry have in common? They are both obsessed with one thing: Endurance.
In this episode of The Cab Call, we attempt a seemingly absurd comparison between the digital world and the social world. We pit the “Mainframe Advocate” against the “Masonry Advocate” to debate the concept of State Preservation.
One runs on silicon, electricity, and error-correcting code. The other runs on ritual, memory, and oral tradition. Both are trying to achieve the exact same goal: keeping a specific set of data intact while the world around them changes.
The Challenge: Which is harder? Preserving a banking ledger with zero corruption for 60 years, or preserving a spoken ritual word-for-word for six centuries?
Transmission: How Mainframe modernization (CDC, Refactoring) compares to Masonic “Word Pairs” and the “Attentive Ear.”
Resilience: Disaster recovery (GDPS, Metro Mirror) vs. the distributed network of human memory.
The Crisis: How both systems face an identical existential threat—the skills gap and the need for apprenticeship.
Join us as we decide whether it’s harder to preserve a binary digit or a moral truth.