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From: fnddr@acad3.fai.alaska.edu (RICE DON D)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.super
Subject: Re: Le Roi est Mort  (was Re: Terminology one more time: Are mainframes and minis "dead?")
Message-ID: <1990Jul9.234902.27344@hayes.fai.alaska.edu>
Date: 9 Jul 90 20:29:18 GMT
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In article <543@garth.UUCP>, fouts@bozeman.ingr.com (Martin Fouts) writes...
> 
>What do you mean by "dead"  Eugene?  I've heard that 16 bit systems
>were dead, and then discovered that DEC sold many hundreds of millions
>of dollars worth of PDP11s last year.  I've heard that mainframes were
>dead, but IBM is still the biggest company in the computer business.

Do we all believe what Datamation says?  No, but here it is anyway, from
the June 15 1990 issue (p 188):
  In 1989, the mainframe died.  In its place, the POWERframe was born--
  the high end in a trio of new computing architectures to emerge for the
  1990s. ...
  The mainframe was _main_ because it was the central point of residence
  of shared logic--the host. ...
  POWERframes.  Characterized by the ability to interface with different
  forms of databases, these machines have parallel processors sharing an
  organizationally common memory and storage hierarchy. ...
  SERVERframes.  Unique in their ability to serve up a locally shared
  database to a work group or a single user, these machines also can access
  organizationally collective databases.
  CLIENTframes.  Home of all new applications and all human interface features,
  these machines eventually will allow users to automatically generate their
  own applications. ...

I don't know if anyone other than the author uses the above definitions, which
sound suspiciously like they were taken from an IBM sales brochure.  Capping
the -frame prefix looks like terminally cute marketingese.  I don't think that
we, the users, have much control over terminology.  Even if we resist the use
of such odious neologisms, the marketing people push them and the people who
buy the machines for us to use mostly like using them (you too can use the
latest technobabble in lieu of original thought!) so we end up using them to
communicate with the salescritters and administrative purse-holders.

Maybe this is what really happened at the Tower of Babel.  The different
project teams got so deeply into their own jargons that they no longer
knew what the others were talking about...

Don Rice
fnddr@acad3.fai.alaska.edu
fnddr@alaska (bitnet)