IBMWatson autobiographythoughts on 780
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computer ads is a spoof of them losing five billion dollars. Here is the text: "What good would your Gateway 2000 PC be if they lost $5,000,000,000? Not much, that's for sure. You see, there...
btw ... has anybody actually seen a hardcopy? they had a photographer come out for a photoshoot ... but pictures don't show up in the online version.
note that it wasn't necessarily either programmer salary or hardware costs that were always the primary factor. whether or not an application was available on the next larger machine (as the company grew) could dominate all costs (or from the other veiwpoint ... costs buttociated with lack of application availability could dominate).
in more recent scenarios about availability ... when we were doing ha-cmp
we talked to various companies about what the costs would be if the application was not available ... these examples are a little more severe than some of the costs buttociated with lack of application availability from the 50s (however, not having the cost savings from some dataprocessing application can be turned around and viewed as a loss ... and-or to justify hardware and programmer expenses).
one financial company that had an application that managed float on cashflow ... claimed the application earned more in 24hrs than a years lease on 50story office bldg (it was housed in) and years salary for every person that worked in the bldg. (conversely if the application was not available ... they didn't earn that money).
they had 360-67 with dat ... and cp67 for time-sharing. melinda gives some of the history i've commented before that the 360-67 dat & time-sharing was actually more succesful than possibly...
another company with a several hundred million dollar datacenter claimed if the datacenter was down for a week, the loss to the company would be more than the cost of the datacenter (i.e. they easily justified the several hundred million dollar expense for duplicating the datacenter). this was in the era when we coined the terms "diaster survivability" and "geographic survivability" to distinguis from disaster-recovery.
for some topic drift ... there is a recent thread somewhat related to how much availability should there be (do applications with privacy requirements require equivalent availability requirements)
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