Mbuttive io was: IBM's mini computerslack thereof

Thank goodness for that; otherwise there would be no bit gods.

There nothing that is clbuttic about computing usage. It all depends on the needs of the users. Nobody seems to get this as THE NUMBER ONE RULE OF COMPUTING.

IBM was used to doing business and thinking within the contexts of business. It was very good at doing data base processing and computing.

DEC was used to doing science and engineering. Their first customers were not business computing but scientific and engineering computing. This is why DEC got good at catering to the people who used computers as their tools of trade.

The tradeoffs to do either one or the other are so different that I don't think one can do well at both using the same hard-software. This is masked in today's biz because the hardware is so damned fast, nobody notices when a computer runs "slow". Or rather, they didn't notice. People are beginning to use PC gear for Cray-like computations and they are beginning to notice that this gear runs horribly "slow".

Again, this all depends on whether you need your computing to store stuff or compute stuff. You are addressing "store stuff". When I talk about a "CPU device" I am talking about "compute stuff". I am talking about serious computing. Remember that I come from a company who understood this kind of computer very well and knew how to deliver it to many users at the same time.

One of our problems is that you are an IBM thinker and I'm a DEC thinker. :-) We automatically address completely different computing needs.

BAH

Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.