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

[Nomen Nescio]

glen herrmannsfeldt <gah at ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:

> 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.

Yes, Tandem and other company I forgot the name of (Stratus?) proved uptime
can be acheived with clustering. However they didn't have the other
mainframe instrinsics to be successful. And they couldn't fight against the
galaxy of legacy mainframe code that only runs on a mainframe.

> > 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.

Well IBM doesn't really care except where it affects them financially.
Unlike Whoracle and HP they're not suicidal. They're homicidal though.

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

It is becoming dramatically less popular thanks to Larry. Have a look on
ebay. People are dumping perfectly good SPARCware by the metric tonne and
pallet load. Most webservers today seem to be running Windows or FreeBSD on
Intel commodity crapware. I'm shorting SPARC futures...