What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS 2126

Three things here.

Firstly, your customers are going to be seriously peeed off if the system is underpowered. But that is not as imporant as the fact that the customers' customers are going to be peeed off.

There is no subsbreastute for speed.

This is where Tops10 did a really good job; minimalism. Do exactly enough for the job. CICS and VTAM also shone here.

VMS is on the other end of the scale, together with Multics, AIX, Primos etc as large, comprehensive, expensive systems.

Secondly, anyone who is watching the micro business from the outside will probably think it has stagnated, because the most visible part has done so; and you don't see the rest. The desktop has become a MS monopoly. You seem to be of this opinion. I beg to differ.

It has just turned into another alley. Look not at what mr Gates is doing, not what he is saying.

Bill Gates is not dumb. He sees that the important stuff is not going to happen on the desktop, and is trying to capture the next generation of consumers with game consoles. Excellent move. I would have done the exact same thing if I were in his shoes.

Computers will turn up everywhere. They will become visible everywhere. This means we will be pushing watts, size and noise for a while instead of mips and baud.

Game machines are drivers, and are the most visible and lovey of them. Capture that market and a lot of other markets will fall by default.

Lastly, the interruption of the feeding cycle was way overdue. The IT business was so fattened and inward-turned it needed the 2000 downturn. Unfortunatly the "incumbents" do not seem to have gotten the message.

Until the Pentium it was about die size. The 68000 and the 80386 both implemented a system capable of supporting a Real OS; but it was a squeeze. The 68020 and the 80486 were capable of getting some semi-decent performance out of it if tuned well. It was the 80586-Pentium and the 68030 that made it possible to be a good plaform for a Real OS.

I am thinking about hardware here. Wasn't the 8600 "son of Venus"?

It would have been doomed to failure without adequate CPU, Memory and I-O horsepower to support it. Repeat after me : There is no subsbreastute for speed.

Good.

Here is the very reason the Internet and open source succeeds.

It all just works together. I can open a file on another machine on a radically different CPU design. I can open a window on another machine with a different design. No problem. I can send a file to a printer in another city with a drag&drop list and a mouseclick.

Maybe not very advanced for mainframe and timesharing people; but an entry to another world for the great unwashed mbuttes.

The first company that delivered something like that to the PeeCee world was Novell. It was a hodgepodge sulution with lots of loose wire and duct tape, but it was pretty efficient and largely worked year in and out without much support.

If we could time-port back I don't think the designers like JMF or TW would have had much problems getting the message. The problems were with the PHBs and above. They simply didn't get the message.

-- mrr