On last week's 30th anniversary of the IBM PC running 's MS-DOS, IBM CTO and PC co-designer PCs are "going the way of the vacuum tube, typewriter, vinyl records, CRT and incandescent light bulbs."

IN PICTURES:

While that seems a bit far-fetched, or at least premature, Network World was able to get a second opinion from another IBM luminary during this week's LinuxCon event in Vancouver, British Columbia. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a 41-year veteran of IBM and one of 's biggest champions at Big Blue, said he agrees that the PC is dead -- but only in the same sense that the mainframe is dead.

The mainframe still makes tons of cash for IBM, but it's no longer the center of innovation. IBM sold off its PC business in 2005, but the PC does and will continue to make tons of cash for other companies, even though it will no longer be the center of innovation, Wladawsky-Berger said during an interview.

"I've thought a lot about it, and it depends what you mean by dead," he said. "This is very important. If you ask me, 'Are mainframes dead?' I would say, well we just announced the new z10 last year, and look at IBM's earnings. For a dead product it's making a lot of money. However, if you ask me, 'Are the mainframes the center of innovation for the IT industry?' I would say that would be lovely but we lost that years ago, at least in the late '80s when client-servers came in."