On Monday 29 April 2002 09:39, you wrote: They don't pay those costly License fees and support contracts out of ignorance. todays mainframes are exteamly muscular, having taken advantage of the same technical advancements Take the old 360 for example, a very old machine, yet it had 16 way interleaved memory, giving it thruput very respectable even when that ram was core. Well, i had assumed most would know that a box that typically served 5000 seats or more was powerfull even as most might not know what it is that really sets these things apart. Channel I/O for example, translating to terms and concepts more familiar to those without OPER console time, imagine a "PC" where every orifice was pumped by its own dedicated DMA controller, where you can have 65535 of these devices. and fill em all up with no load on the CPU. Remember when the mickysoft press release parroting nattering nabob computer press was declaring the death of the mainframe ? and very humorous events like when the idiot press would read a product release about NT being ported to an FSIOP card, and run to print "NT Ported to the mainframe ! " A FSIOP card, File Server I/O Processor, is a PC on a card that plugs into the mainframe so that it can share mainframe DASD (disk) or have a faster channel for I/O to PC based middleware, it certainly isn't NT running on the mainframe in the manner the hapless readers of these sorry articles was led to believe. As for CPU power, PC's are certainly as fast per CPU in a general sense as a mainframe, but without the I/O capacity could never hope to replace a mainframe anytime soon. Those same press twits that reported the death of the mainframe later wrote articles that perhaps they would be around longer than expected and finnaly that IBM was selling more of them than ever before. The PC running something decent does rival the power of a mainframe or a supercomputer of yesterday however, its just that most cant tell when all that performance is bloated out with a utterly total garbage OS called winblows that is such utter garbage that at last time i checked w2k needed 64megs of ram for the installer to run ? how absurd ! Compare with the size of bsd/linux/unix that will still run on a machine with 4megs or compare with a mainframe nucleus and you see that they on the other hand, have stayed small tight and fast. and assembler is still very mainstream on the mainframe where thruput of massive loads is still the focus. No, i really didnt think i would be misunderstood as saying it was practical or even passable beyond laughable that i was sugessting a PC could replace a mainframe. The computation power needed to emulate that hardware in any useable sense is not small however, on the bare metal the PC has caught up to those machines and surpassed all but the newest on a per CPU basis, the ability to get 5 mips or so emulating 360/70/90 instructions is testament that the lowly PC has become very muscular in its own right. Look at a mainframe stuffed full of channel controlers and you see very similar type of thing, and one of the reasons why big iron is so powerfull. a modern uP is the equal of a mainframe CPU today, but you get more out of the mainframe cpu computationally because it does not have to do anything else. Raymond