[Info-vax] Maybe a bit OT, maybe not.. in any case an interesting article

[glen herrmannsfeldt]

David Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
> Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> Technologies come and technologies go all the time.

> This says more than one might first think about.

> Early computers had some uses, and were used accordingly.  
> They really were way too big, heavy, non-portable, and expensive 
> for many uses.

> Then along came the PC.  Did the original uses for computers 
> go away?  No, for the most part they did not.  However, 
> the lesser (Ok, this is highly objective, but let's not get 
> into that) uses that many PCs were used for, from a quantity 
> perspective, greatly overshadowed the usage of earlier computers.  

Yes. Well, many of those uses increased in size as prices dropped.

One use for big computers for many years was scientific computing.

(snip)

> The problem is, some of the uses of the early computers still 
> exist.  But the systems are a very small part of the total market.  

Yes, but in many cases the machines made for the large market
work just fine. Much of scientific computing has enjoyed the
benefit of cheap fast machines that people buy to run Outlook
or Excel even when a slower machine would do just fine.

VAX/VMS was popular for scientific computing for many years,
more affordable than an IBM/370, but often big and fast enough
to do the job. (Even if it takes a day or two.)

> The same seems to be happening to the PCs.  Regardless of the 
> total market, the small parts are still essential to some users, 
> however, they have less and less attention from the vendors.

Partly it is that they can live with what it being produced
for the masses. The really really high end looks for machines
like those from Cray, but a very large fraction of scientific
computing is done on more ordinary machines.

> What makes it worse is, customers want a mainframe for the price 
> of an Ipod, and feel that's what they should get.  Well, 
> I want a lot of things too, but get very few of them.

It seems to me that the demand for mainframes now is for
business computing where uptime and reliability are very
important. That can be done on a farm of smaller machines, too.

> So if you have some of the "traditional" needs for a computer 
> system, you're a very small market, and the vendors tell you 
> to put up with windoz and linux and go away and stop 
> bothering them, they want to sell more tablet computers.

Yes. Even so, they larger computers have gotten cheaper
(at least for the hardware), but not quite as fast.

> From what I can see, the only company still listening to the 
> users of large systems is IBM.  HP doesn't seem to really 
> care.  Not sure who else is left.

Sun SPARC/Solaris used to be pretty popular for web servers.
Maybe it still is.

-- glen