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From: bzs@BU-CS.BU.EDU (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: What's the future of the mainframe?
Message-ID: <8803052348.AA21708@bu-cs.bu.edu>
Date: 5 Mar 88 23:48:03 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
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The mainframe seems to be getting more threadbare as each year passes.
Typical mainframes these days (eg. IBM3090) deliver about 30MIPs per
processor, 1..6 processors and large memory systems which remains
somewhat, but not very, impressive. Certainly with the advent of
20+MIPs chips from manufacturers like Sun and Motorola it won't be
long before those cpu/memory configurations will be available on
machines in the $250K or less price range (I beleve Arrete just
commited to parallel processing on the SPARC, Encore is certainly
moving towards these speeds, others, including MIPS [the company] are
moving a hair's breadth away.)

Of course, in the mainframe market there's a lot more than mere
central processing performance. You have I/O speed which is critical,
reliability and a vendor who will back it all up in many different
ways. It's on these latter points that a company like IBM wins big.

But what percentage of the computing growth needs mainframes anymore?
Back in the days of the 370/168 with its 2MIPs and 4MB of memory it
seemed like you needed a mainframe to do much anything and a lot of
people cling to that mentality. I have no doubt that JC Penney's or
MasterCard need these machines, but what about the zillions of other
people who bought IBM back when it was the only thing that would
handle their few hundred thousand records (perhaps a few dozen
megabytes) and don't realize that today you could process that kind of
data on a relatively modest processor?

I realize that a lot of these folks keep buying these beasts due to
their own software investment and you can't really expect a vendor
like IBM to maintain a 10-year old system, so roll in the next model,
what choice is there.

One big backpressure of course is the need for distributed
computation, these days every local department expects to be able to
have some of their own computes rather than just telecom to the
mainframe. A friend in the biz who handles some Wall St accounts
claims that the bigger and bigger mainframe approach is collapsing
under its own weight. The systems are too complicated, growing them is
putting more and more eggs in a bigger and bigger basket, the systems
analysts are feeling seriously out of control of their own systems.

Does distributing help? It's not clear, but it's there and the current
star topology approach (ie. one big mainframe with all the critical
data and a bunch of lesser, second-class-citizen local processors)
isn't fitting in. Dogs wag tails, tails wag dogs.

Even on the academic campus more and more people I speak to seem to be
frustrated enough with the centralized approach (even the modest
time-sharing systems) to computing that they would rather deal with
less than deal with the bureaucracies these large "data centers"
inevitably grow to become.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University