On Monday 29 April 2002 15:35, you wrote: Well the newer ones are getting better, the new fridge sized boxes require a fraction of the cooling the old ones did Ok perspective is needed, here is a picture http://www.nop.org/misc/pics/360370/360-75_2075_Computer_Room.jpg Add in the other stuff that would fill up a room or two on most the other buildings on campus, depending on year you have card punches 3174 term controllers really messy wire closets and racks of IBM MAU's ( the token ring equ of a HUB ) this is long before things started getting small, a IBM 3864 modem was a hefty 30 pounds or so. So what i said was correct, the herc emu is emulating the majority of all that stuff, dasd,, tapes,, card deck with an emulated "reader" the 3174's and the terminals, that campus full of stuff running virtualized on your PC. Hard when they are busy posting stories about IBM's double digit growth i guess ;=) ( with IBM giving much of the credit to the iron penguins ;=) It was this crackpot on infoworld, but he wasnt alone, it was at the time when the press would talk about NT everywhere when it was knowwhere, i guess doing their part to create the illusion of "everyone else, why not you?" Before that OS/2 and Netware was already on them. Well a decent modern board is no slouch there either really http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q2/020424/index.html Give that a look at what comming w the hammer line You cant really trash PC I/O anymore, its right up there with everything else and surpasses all the old workstations, current PC I/O dont compete with a current mainframe, but what ever did ? There has been really large R&D sums spent on pushing PC performance. and its starting to show bigtime. In a way, comparing a mainframe to a PC is like a coal train to a dodge viper, sure the viper is faster, but lets see how well it does hooked to 80 hopper cars full of coal eh ? Well litteraly yesterday, dreamworks, pixar etc is going all linux for their stuff and the supercomputers people talk about these days on the www.top500.org list are linux clusters. Another example, look at www.ltsp.org, they are netbooting old retired PC's used a diskless xterminals and hanging up to 200 of them off a modern machine that the apps run on. It saves them bucks, and a machine not bloated down to a 486 with winblows can hump a good load these days. Stay small they did, sure the linux kernel tree has grown with the in-tree driver count and branches for all the different hardware, the same tree builds for a sun alpha or s390. but the resultant built kernel has not grown much over the years, same for the mainframe, sure it has lots of services hanging around it but its core also has stayed very trim. One important object of kernel development is for the code to get smaller and faster consistent with the other goals. Linux, the BSD's and IBM's top line operating systems have done well here. My firewall DNS mail www and other sundres is still running on an old 486 EISA machine, and its just as happy running the same kernel and userspace as the 1000mhz linux box with the nvidia 3D card, runs fast on slow machines, runs all the faster on fast machines. The agenda for mickysoft dumbf**kware n co, however, seems to be ""cover up any hardware performance gains ( and existing hardware) with bloat, forcing the market to buy new boxes and end up with no gain at all."" My main beaf with x86 is register starvation, at least AMD is doing something about it. c++ for example, eats a register for "this" and on a register starved cpu it hurts far more than others that have more registers, this type of thing is perhaps why some fare well by compare despite slower clock speeds. Its hard to ignore raw speed however, what the x86 lacks archtectually its seems to be making it up with brute force. Raymond