new/old computers in radiology (Long)

One of the Radiologist's I work with asked me the following question. Which computer would you buy if you were only going to do file transfers and archiving? I answered a VAX/Alpha running VMS since there were no known viruses and that system security was good. My answer was predicated on the fact that he needed storage for medical images and that he needed to maintain complete medical confidentiality. He is totally frustrated with the lack of reliability on Windows NT and is favoring SUN based systems. The trend in radiology is to move toward Windows NT platforms because the companies can't get support staff that can handle anything else. Our biggest problem, since we are a children's hospital is that we must maintain the data for 25 years. Actually 7 years once the child turns 18. In practice we plan never to get rid of any data. Examples of systems in Radiology CT scanner using SGI computer CT workstation using SUN running Solaris Vitrea 3D workstation using Windows NT on HP Kayak computer Laser film printer network running MS-DOS Laser film printer network running LINUX MRI scanner using SUN Film digitizer running on PC using Windows NT Nuclear medicine system with Windows NT, Mac G4, and Linux on PC VME systems embedded in film printers I have 8" floppies from old CT scanners, QIC tapes, DAT tapes, MO disks, 5 1/4 floppies, 3 1/2 floppies, 9 track tapes I was offered from a major US company a radiology image management system the other day that had the following systems. Windows NT display stations Apple Macintosh image archive server Sun webserver and image server I don't think anybody could support and troubleshoot such a system. Their answer is that they support the system today and will provide an upgrade path when they change every 3-4 years. woe-is-me Mike mmcfadden(a)cmh.edu