Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!WVNVM.WVNET.EDU!U1DF1 From: U1DF1@WVNVM.WVNET.EDU ("John Neubert") Newsgroups: comp.society.futures Subject: res-requestk... Message-ID: <8902171939.AA04717@multimax.encore.com> Date: 17 Feb 89 17:29:15 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 35 Comments-of: "John Neubert" Had some problems sending this originally. ***----------------------> Original Mail From <----------------------*** "John Neubert" ***------------------------------------------------------------------*** >In article <8902162247.AA28231@multimax.encore.com>, bzs@ENCORE (Barry Shein) > writes: >>The point is obvious, organizations which have built their empires by >>providing MIPS are, in most cases, doomed... >Most MIS groups have built their empires on accounting and services, not >on MIPS. You're still going to need someone to work out the corporate >licencing on Lotus 1-2-3, not to mention storing the backup tapes. >Bill Isn't it interesting that Novell can run it's whole corporation (admin, order processing, *EVERYTHING*) with a LAN and PCs. Distributed processing (the catch word over a decade ago) is the catch word again (with a little different meaning). With OSs like Mach, Helios, NCS, and the other experiments at parallelism for Unix, the battle for mainframes to be anything but big database servers is now engaged. That is the perfect function for an IBM 3090 with a large disk farm -- a server! Why anyone would need to compute on a mainframe, with departmental systems, workstations, LANs, and supers for real number crunching, is now the primary question. Why do you think IBM is tying the note as closely as possible (SAA, etc, to get everyone thinking they need big iron to run all that cycle hungry s/w)? Will it work? Who knows. I certainly am not going to count them out. Other analysts say the mini vendors must be worried. This has all been said before, BUT the big things lacking then and starting to come together now are: LANs, very fast backbone communications (FDDI), very powerful desktop systems, and maybe even the s/w to do it all.