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From: bzs@BU-CS.BU.EDU (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Mainframes and Macs
Message-ID: <8803090115.AA01492@bu-cs.bu.edu>
Date: 9 Mar 88 01:15:46 GMT
References: <8803082313.AA01918@infinet.uucp>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
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I agree with Rob that a lot of the interest in mainframes continues to
be transaction processing. Besides mere performance (as Rob points
out) there's also of course reliability, you can idle a lot of people
if the system goes down and that means buckos, big buckos.

To put that in perspective I have a late 70's O/S text with a case
study of a transaction system that IBM did which claimed 15,000
on-line users. Hey, let's talk big...

There was a recent interview in Unix/World or Unix/Review with a guy
who did a big transaction processing system for Bell using Unix in the
late 70's / early 80's. I remember he made a comment that if it weren't
for the great support Unix gave for synchronous terminals (read:
3278s) it wouldn't have been possible (?!)

I suppose one can argue whether or not transaction processing is
something the Unix world should even bother with, but I guess there's
big bucks in it, it's been done before apparently, so what the heck,
de gustibus non disputendum.

	-B