Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2001 04:55:17 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: mwm@mired.org (Mike Meyer) Cc: hornback@wireco.net (Andrew C. Hornback), chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Now a little OT but RE: FreeBSD and Linux (More Questions!) Message-ID: <200103150455.VAA01766@usr05.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <15024.15515.195623.598446@guru.mired.org> from "Mike Meyer" at Mar 14, 2001 09:52:59 PM
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> > I don't remember this... but it sounds like it was from the late > > 70s/early 80s. Heck, I barely remember Amdahls at all... I've only > > seen pictures of 'em, as far as I know. *grins* > > Well, if I've seen an Amdahl, I didn't notice it. The places I worked > with IBM hardware was true blue. I *have* helped judge Amdahl bids in > response to an RFQ, though. The suit was filed on behalf of CDC in 1956. It was dropped by the DOJ in 1982, 26 years later. IBM paid the fines as just another cost of doing business. [ ... ] > Yeah, minicomputers were basically indistinguishable from from > mainframes at the end user level. While minicomputers could replace > mainframes, there wasn't a lot of incentive to do so. The end users > really didn't see a difference, as they had terminals on their desk in > either case. All that really happened was that you probably had to > buy new applications and convert all your data for a new platform. Back in the "bill you for CPU seconds" days, there was a lot of incentive to buy your own machine. Departmental control was only a tiny fraction of the incentive. The biggest incentive at the time for minicomputers is budget level at which you require external approval. Most universities and all governement agencies, at least in the U.S., ended up buying minicomputers. Computer category as also a big deal, as far as what you were allowed to buy, since it was bean counters in the computing services centers trying to protect their income on CPU time billing to departments who made the rules, never knowing that what they were approving was letting someone out from under their thumb, until amost everyone had escaped. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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