Dear Shawn, Jens,
It were the old days. Computers on a central location with simple terminals.
With the introduction of client/server concepts those nice things doesn't have
a future people (= manager/salesmen) think. With the bomming internet the main-
frames return. Return for security, performance and capacity.
The benefits of VAX was the low price. The prices of mainframes were very high and
also an enormous amount of effort must put into it. In the early days to pay for
hardware and the sources were for free. Each location was creating his own
user's environment.
High prices: for one of those mainframe the monitor cost nearly 100.000$. At that
moment the price of a nice home.
Also in those days our organisation was buying a small computer from Data General
to run Office applications. The price was 1.000.000$. Now we can buy for less then
1.000$ a personal computer with the processor power 100 times that one.
Possible some of you knows Cray supercomputers. An organisation nearly dead, but
now they are working on computer with the speed of 25.000 Pentium IV computers
together. Concepts of Cray from the past with vectorizing code can solve pro-
blems which are impossible to do with parrallel computing.
greetings.
