20 Mar
2002
20 Mar
'02
5:43 p.m.
It wasn't. It does thing that today's desktops
can't do. When is the
last time you got 99.999% uptime out of a PC?
Not counting an eight-hour power failure, one of my PC-based servers
has had under two minutes of unscheduled downtime in seven years of
24x7 operation. That's better than 99.9999%.
Of course, it's not running Windows.
If I were running a mission-critical application, it would be easy
enough to outfit it with a backup generator so that even the whims
of PG&E wouldn't cause me grief. But the downtime due to PG&E
problems is certainly not the fault of the PC, and would have bit
me even if I'd been running a "real computer".
Even though the
theoretical bandwidth of the PCI bus was 120+ MB/sec systems rarely
achieved > 1 - 2 MB/sec sustained throughput.
I don't know what systems those were, but my first 486 PCI system
routinely got sustained PCI throughput of over 15 MB/second, between
disk, ethernet, and display.
Even many ISA bus systems could sustain over 4 MB/second.