18 Aug
2010
18 Aug
'10
2:33 a.m.
On 8/17/10 9:12 PM, Rich Alderson wrote:
Point taken. ;)
> 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.
Nice!
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL