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From: fotland@hpihoah.HP.COM (Dave Fotland)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: What is a Mainframe?
Message-ID: <4420012@hpihoah.HP.COM>
Date: 4 Jun 89 16:43:03 GMT
References: <8442@june.cs.washington.edu>
Organization: Hewlett Packard, Cupertino
Lines: 11

A mainframe is a machine whose minimum usable configuration costs over
$1 Million (or pick your favorite number).  You can't use performance in the
definition since it varies with time.  Mainframes have other distinguishing
features, such as:

Availability (total unplanned downtime/total time) > 99.8% 
Mean time to repair (including travel and diagnose time) < 4 hours
Operating system/hardware support for high thruput, low latency transaction
	processing.

-David Fotland