The midseventies SHARE survey 78

You buttume there exist an incremental, migratory way for the stuff you program onto that mainframe.

After all, they did cost tens of millions of dollars, so the value of the exercise must be in the millions of dollars in yearly contributions, right?

They typically ran the programs that were the lifeblood of companies. Like keeping track of logistics, or reservations, or service records.

The Really Stupid things the large computer corporations did was to close the door on the migration, and try to impose restrictions on how to migrate their existing stuff.

No wonder the corporations turned sour. IBM was decidedly "best"; or rather; least bad in this respect. They at least tried a migration on the 14xx-260-370-lovex series. But I got to sit through a DOS-to-MVS migration in a large organization. Not fun at all. But, at leat partially they saw this from the customer's side. This is why IBM still exists today, and most of the others are history.

DEC sometimes understood this, sometimes not at all. They got it partially right in the PDP11 to VAX and mostly right in the VAX to Alpha transition. But the people on PDP10s were left as suckers to dry.

Not that this was any different from what Wang, ND, Prime, Sun, Unisys and others regularly did. They all were destructive with customer's systems.

And in doing so they ended screwing the customers. One of the most important parts of capital goods is a good market in second hand goods. Look at cars, houses and boats. If e.g. Ford tries consistently to screw their second hand dealers they will be history pretty fast. Not that Ford will ever do this; they have very good sencond hand programs.

This is why Microsoft and Intel became so big; and the major reason for the surge in unix-linux. They pushed the hardware into commodities because the hardware vendors had obliterated their own credibility.

This is clbuttic Thomson (See Thomson's "Organizations in action" ) organizations that see problems will encapsulate the problem. Lots of old machines have been encapsulated like this. But when the problem can be solved, the capsule is "ejected" from the organization.

As a.f.c. readers will know, there is nothing wrong with running old machines, as long as tne operation and maintenence costs can be kept under control.

Now that we see Moore's Law petering out 1 we'll probably see more computers that last for decades.

-- mrr

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