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James Fidell wrote: > > If it's really that good, why did people start moving away from > mainframes? First, the flight from mainframes is generally overstated. The mainframe computer market was growing a long time after the reported death of mainframes, so you have to see the explosion in personal computers as alongside mainframes for the majority of the period. Second you have to look at what that market was like, mainframes were expensive, stunningly so. I know companies that replaced "mainframes" with "midrange" Unix server that had as much power as the old "mainframe" and better software for the price of their mainframe maintanence budget. Perhaps the better question is how were mainframes sold at all given the huge price tags they carried in the 1990's, the answer I suspect was backward compatibility, and the huge costs of replacing established systems. To an extent the same problem you see now with Windows, everyone (well most outside Microsoft) agrees the DOS/Windows operating systems are a mess of trying to hack multiuser stuff onto an outdated system, but everyone is committed to business processes involving specific Windows software. That is why one local firm failed to replace their aging mainframe systems at least three times (well that and some doubtful management, but then management had never HAD to replace the mainframe before). Interestingly this sort of lockin is what the "open systems" people were touting their wares as a way of avoiding. And those that went that way can probably still point to a selection of suppliers in their hardware and software market (including GNU/Linux these days). When people talk about "mainframes" they don't usually mean SUN, HP and Oracle, they mean IBM, ICL, DB2, BMC and CA. HP, SUN and Oracle are largely what replaced the mainframes. For most businesses I suspect the whole desktop computing thing was a big mistake. The success was down to "open hardware" specs that led to cheap commodity hardware, and hence a thriving market in software. I suspect if businesses could have got that variety of software some other way, it would never have happened. Yes we got VHS solution, not the best, but the economics and timing conspired to make it happen that way. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html