Re: what's a mainframe, was is Vax addressing sane today

John Levine wrote:

According to Stephen Fuld  <sfuld@alumni.cmu.edu.invalid>:

IBM definitely cared about maximum performance in the 1950s and early

1960s.
>
Yes.  And remember, one of the goals of S/360 was to provide an
architecture that could handle both scientific (i.e. compute bound) and
business (i.e. I/O bound) workloads.

 I don't think anyone would have forseen how quickly scientific computing
moved to mini and micro computers with fast CPUs and weak peripherals.
Perhaps once the RAM is big enough to hold all the data the I/O performance
is not a big deal.

Back around 1986 or so I stated that all programming tasks will migrate down to the lowest/cheapest architecture which is large enough to handle the task. This meant that I was sure both minis and mainframes would go away, so I was in fact only 99.9% correct. :-)
Terje
--
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"