Re: Newbie question on table design.

paul c <toledobythesea_at_oohay.ac> writes:
> also, not sure if you could even buy them then or around 1965 when the
> 360's made their splash, the price was nominal to satisfy accountants,
> either or both corporate or governmental and leasing was the only way
> to acquire. the even bigger money was in maintenance fees and buyer
> lock-in.
>
> much smaller world then. around 1990, i asked some knowledgeable
> hardware types how many mainframes there were in the world and how
> many were sold per year, of 3033 class (speed of what was called a
> "couple of mips") and the general concensus seemed to be several
> thousand, with a big sales year for Hitachi, Amdahl and IBM consisting
> of several hundred boxes sold. i know some 4341/4381's approached
> that mip rating, but find it hard to believe that there were many
> customers who ordered hundreds of them.
>
> Multiply those numbers by a few dozen or a hundred real programmers
> for each cpu and it's not hard to see why brain-washed oldtimers wax
> nostalgic or why there is so much commercial chaos now, with hundreds
> of thousands of accomplished programmers who have an equal right to
> believe they have seen the truth.

re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#2 Newbie question on table design.

4341 was around mip (early models slightly less, later ones more).

both vax/vms and 43xx machines appeared to drop below threshhold and started trend towards department machines. by the mid-80s and 4381 time-frame ... workstations and larger PCs were started to take over that market segment.

posting
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#15 departmental servers with old email reference to a customer upgrading/changing order from 20 to a couple hundred over a period of approx. six months. http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#email790404b

internally the explosion in the machines as departmental machines had a large number of the conference rooms (like in STL and other locations) being taken over for 43xx departmental machines

major market segment that were early into ordering hundreds at a time was chip industry (for running chip design tools ... things that would eventually migrate to the emerging high-end workstations).

old post with a decade of vax/vms machines sliced & diced by model, year, us/non-us
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#0 Computers in Science Fiction

43xx ... aka 4331 (follow-on to 135/138) and 4341 (follow-on to 145/148) shipped more in that mid-range market than DEC. both 43xx follow-on and dec vax/vms show the effect of workstations and large PCs starting to take over that mid-range market in the mid-80s.

six 4341s would provide higher aggregate performance than 3033 at lower cost ... and were easier to justify and easier to house. some of the old 43xx email
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#43xx

includes discussions working with the disk division on moving various disk design and development tools to clusters of 43xx machines ... that resided in various locations outside the datacenter (and off of the large mainframes that required extensive faciilties, cooling, and space requirements in large datacenters). part of the discussion was that there was never going to be any way that they were going to be able to cost justify and/or provide physical facilities ... for the amount of processing that was going to be needed (assuming the high-end mainframes). Received on Fri May 04 2007 - 01:58:42 CEST