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From: ted@imsvax.UUCP (Ted Holden)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Mainframes vs micros
Message-ID: <653@imsvax.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 21-Dec-86 17:39:27 EST
Article-I.D.: imsvax.653
Posted: Sun Dec 21 17:39:27 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 21-Dec-86 21:04:26 EST
Organization: IMS Inc, Rockville MD
Lines: 94






Tim Kay of Caltech writes:


>(Ted Holden) writes:
>>The clones cost about half or a third what IBM's do and they (the
>>clones) don't break.  IBM must be wishing they'd never heard the words
>>"PC" or "micro-computer" along about now.  Without IBM's interference,
>>micros would never have achieved the standardization which is now
>>allowing them to challenge minis and mainframes.  And IBM?  They
>>invented the PC/DOS game and now they can't even play their own game
>>successfully and the game is threatening to destroy their big Fortune
>>500 mainframe business.  Kind of like letting the genie out of the
>>bottle.

>You've said several very interesting things here.  First of all,
>which is more reliable, IBM or compatibles?  Business people often
>think that, if you buy a machine from IBM, it must be more reliable
>than a machine from some small company.  And I have seen many a flakey
>clone.  However, I have also seen many lemons from IBM.  Big Blue seems
>to have very poor quality control regarding their PCs.  They also offer
>(by recent standards) an unreasonably short warranty and a very
>expensive maintenance contract.  I am beginning to think that IBM
>equipment might cost more to keep running.

The pieces for PCs are all pretty much generic now;  anybody can fix them, and
most do so for less than IBM charges.  IBM owners have suffered major
grief with CMI disks in recent times (check the April 29,86 issue of PC
Magazine for details), and their system of subcontracting is not such as
to allay fears that similar things won't be happening on other models in
the future.

>Next, I can't see how PCs are competing with minis and mainframes.  An
>80[23]86 at 8 or even 16Mhz still doesn't pack a fraction of the
>computing power of a Vax 11/780.  And, for the work I do, a Vax is
>a small machine.  A 3090/400 is roughly 50 times as powerful.

If your name is John Rockafeller and you go out and purchase a 3090 as
YOUR personal computer, then and only then does your argument make any
sense.  In real life, it never works like that.  You will always be
one of 300 people trying to use a mainframe at the same time, and the
legitimate comparison is between an AT and whatever fraction of a
mainframe's capabilities you are ever likely, in the real world, to be
able to use.

The comparison is between a mainframe and a system of micros.  Four years ago
there may have been some break-even point beyond which the multi-user machine
was cheaper on a per user basis; now it isn't even close.  A good 8mh XT compat
with a hard disk can be had now for less than the cost of a terminal to a
mainframe.  Especially for applications which are screen I/O intensive, the
idea of using multi-user computers no longer makes any sense.  A VAX set up to
serve 30 people doing mostly word processing will cost $150K - $200K, including
terminals, wiring, and software.  It'll be slower than hell, you'll have 30
people out looking for jobs all the time and, whenever it goes down, you'll
have 30 people sitting on their thumbs for two or three whole days.  

$70K, intelligently spent, could have XT class machines on everybody's desk
with legal copies of WordPerfect and good dot-matrix printers, two laser
printers for everybody to share, and two or three back-up machines off to one
side so that nobody ever sits on their thumbs when a machine goes down;  you
just swap one of the extras for the machine out being fixed.  Development
environments in which most users' time is spent in text editors present an
entirely similar situation.

I have never seen anyone smile while using a mainframe the way they do using
ATs.  There are many good reasons.  Memory for multi-user machines has always
been expensive and scarce;  you no sooner try to scroll down one page in an
editor or word processor on a mainframe than you have to swap information in
from disk and you're ALWAYS 300'th in line to use that disk.  Memory for PCs is
dirt cheap and DOS programs such as WordPerfect and SuperCalc reflect that and
USE it as if it were plentiful.  WordPerfect can scroll through a 50 or 100
page document in seconds;  I don't know of any mainframe product which can.  

Turbo Pascal can compile 2000 line programs in 10 seconds or so on a 6mh AT; 
again, I don't know of any mainframe compiler which can do this.  The superior
compute power claimed for mainframes has a way of seeming very little in
evidence in the real world, in which most of the speed and elegance which users
actually observe derives from intelligent programming rather than raw power. 
And the best programming being done these days is for the mass market machines
where the biggest payoff is, not for mainframes.  

Likewise, hardware breakthroughs are now hitting the DOS market first and only
then possibly filtering down to the mainframe market.  This includes all kinds
of things from superior disk technology to optical scanners, projection devices
etc.  

As I see it, the day of the expensive computer is about over.  It is only for
super-computer applications such as weather forecasting and really big database
applications that they could be justified at all any more, and the small
machines will be capable of those activities in another couple of years.