Strange how you notice things like that. Anyone else got examples?

Well some do say that Bill G is the anti-christ. Don't see it myself, his company helped to move away from the centralised, non-inclusive world of the main-frame.

Jono

quote:

Well some do say that Bill G is the anti-christ. Don't see it myself

Well (said in a Sven Goran Ericsson type voice) how do you explain the horns and tail then?

good point, well made.

Jono

quote:

Originally posted by Jono 13:
Well some do say that Bill G is the anti-christ. Don't see it myself, his company helped to move away from the centralised, non-inclusive world of the main-frame.

Jono

Jono, isn't it strange how the computer world is once again moving back to centralised data centres and servers...

perhaps because there is a real need for 99.999% availability and control instead of distributed anarchy

Well said Derek. Can't imagine your background!

The centralised, non-inclusive (not sure what that means Jono) has enjoyed a resurgence since IBM sank a couple of billions of dollars into revitalising it a few years ago. There are really no better ways yet available to handle huge volumes of transactions on a daily basis. I have one customer whose central billing system handles 300 million transactions a day. Try doing that on any Gates-derives system!

Gates-derived even!

Chris

I have not had a VM logon for nearly 8 years now and as for an MVS or whatever it morphed into it has been 20 years since I had a logon id.

Centralised, non-inclusive means a small number of usually social knuckle draggers keeping their "babies" away from the everyday workers.

As an example if you look to my working world without PCs the CAD revolution would not have happened.

I do agree that a centralised data store model is good, but centralised processing is less attractive as each extra node accessing the data set needs a significant increase in server power. This is particularly accute in the CAD world of processor intensive applications.

Also I remember the (in)famous quote by Ken Olsen(?) of DEC in the mid to late '70's saying something like "I can never see the need for a computer on everyone's desk". How wrong can you be?

Jono