18 Jan
1998
18 Jan
'98
12:49 p.m.
Well not necessarily. Of late IBM has been putting
effort into making
S/390 (note: less than 7 years old and not quite a classic) available
to small shops: via the P/390 (a 7490 mainframe on a chip hosted by a pentium
running OS/2) and the R/390 (also a 7490 with an AIX host - RS/6k or PPC).
I must apologize: in a previous message I had referred to the mainframe on
a chip as a "3490" which is a tape drive not a CPU model number.
Yes, and in time I will probably want an S/390.
It seems to be a trend to make scaled-back machines for office
environments. The most suprising is Cray, with their EL and J series
machines, that just need 240V.
And I lust for either of them as well.
At any rate keep an eye out for P/390 on a PC Server
500 (maybe the P90s will
wind up on the used market?) and the equivalent R/390 machine - they take only
wall plug 110 AC and will let you hack JCL, assembler, and CLISTs to your
heart's content - destined to be classics.
Actually, I am interested in the big IBM stuff mostly for the hardware.
IBM software, in my opinion, is rather bad - operating systems to
software. The magic is all under the sheet metal in the form of fab
techniques that are consistantly about 5 years ahead of the rest of
the world. The architectures also tend to be fascinating.
William Donzelli
william(a)ans.net