AMD to leave x86 behind

ref:

also in play in the late 80s was the whole installed terminal emulation product base:

by the mid-80s, there was a big uptake in pcs in the terminal emulation market. for about the same price as an existing mainframe terminal, it was possible to replace it with a pc that had effectively the same desk footprint, the same cost, and could not only perform the existing mainframe terminal functions but also could provide some local personal processing.

as you moved into the late 80s, it was turning out that the mainframe RAS culture had frequently created an extremely inflexible and slow-to-change-adapt mainframe service environment. as a result there was some big increase in new personal business applications that could be used at the desktop (which might take years to be deployed from the datacenter). as this application segment evolved ... they also had a bigger and bigger appebreaste for cororate data (stored back in the datacenter) ... and were rapidly outgrowing the data feed capability provided by terminal emulation paradigm.

as a result, there was a big upswing in the hard disk requirements at the desk. there was quite a bit of customer turmoil ... frequently the data represented the jewels of the corporation and having that data migrated out of the high-RAS, disaster-recovery, etc datacenter to people's desktops could create enormous corporate business risk .... which was a trade-off against having new and more valuable business applications.

the mainframe disk division created and tried to announce some number of new products that would provide desktops with nearly local disk performance access to datacenter resident data. this put the mainframe disk division in direct conflict with mainframe communcation division which now had an enormous install base of terminal emulation products. the communication division was constantly fighting to have such new products end ... viewing them as a threat to their terminal emulation market.

it was during this period that the communication division floated the SAA strategy .... which, in many respects, was an attempt to try and cram the client-server genii back into the bottle. the discored between the disk division and the communication division got so bad. that one year, at the annual, world-wide, internal communication division conference, a senior person from the disk division (as opening to his talk on distributed data access) began with a quote about the head of the mainframe communication division was going to be directly responsible for the rest of the mainframe disk division; aka that the migration of some number of applications to the destops were inevitable, but it was still possible to provide datacenter data access (sort of early day nas-san technology) for those appolications; if only things could move beyond the severe limitations imposed by terminal emulation paradigm (the alternative which was in play, was the wholesale migration of corporate data out of the datacenter to desktop machines).

it was also during this period that we had created 3-tier architecture and were out doing some number of customer executive presentations.

this put us on the receiving end of the wrath from forces buttociated with SAA and preserving the terminal emulation paradigm.

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