James Fidell wrote:
>
> If it's really that good, why did people start moving away from
> mainframes?
I think that this mainly happened (business) because secretaries of small firms were suddenly able to afford a BBC Micro for what, £300 plus monitor? Suddenly you didn't need to be a government, or a wal-mart branch, to afford a computer for your business. And of course, these one or two computers grew into a lot of computers by the mid-90s, and by that time they had Windows on them.
Here's how it evolved at my primary school:
Tons of BBC Bs, then we got a donation of two Win95 PCs, and then we bought another from RM, and then we obtained a few more by various means... Then we got a new phone line to the IT room and we had three or four computers with a personal Freeserve account. Then I left, but my sister remained... they obtained a DSL connection and wanted to network the computers, etc. The last I heard, they'd paid someone to come and install a network for them, but had discovered that Windows XP Home can't connect to a domain. *chingching*
Hopefully at one point the IT teacher (from whom I won the IT cup for removing two desktop shortcuts and moving the taskbar) will contact me about it, and I can get a Debian server in there, complete with Samba.
