17 Aug
2010
17 Aug
'10
6:12 p.m.
From: Dave McGuire
Sent: Tuesday, August 17, 2010 5:12 PM
On 8/17/10 7:59 PM, William Donzelli wrote:
> Compare apples to oranges - when the VAX-11 line
was out, IBM had the
> 4300 line. These machines were specifically designed not to require
> operations staff, a big infrastructure, pure batch operation, and so
> forth.
Wow, was the 4300 series really intended to not need
an operations
staff? If so, they sure did miss the mark there.
I worked for a company that had a 4341, and frequently
visited four
customer sites, with three 4341s and a 4381. (I worked in field service
at the time, unfortunately not for IBM) I think the smallest operations
staff for any of those intended-to-be-operations-staff-free machines was
two employees.
Ahh, but Dave, the typical IBM mainframe shop required 8-12 operators.
From that point of view, the 4300s were marvels of low
operational staff.
At the University of Chicago, I was friends with the lead graduate student
on the STEM (Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope), the one that made
the IBM logo out of individual gold atoms. Their graphics processor was
a 4361--and they had no professional operations staff at all. The grad
students did the minimal amount to get it running, and that was all.
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104
mailto:RichA at vulcan.com
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.PDPplanet.org/
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/