Re: Microsoft "mainframe"

To be clear, as I understand the story having heard it from more than one person in Rochester, it was not their choice to give up on the "smart 5250 terminal", rather it was a case where the senior leadership in IBM felt the idea would be better served by the Boca Raton group so it was moved there.

Jim Oberholtzer
CEO/Chief Technical Architect
Agile Technology Architects, LLC


On 6/19/2010 10:23 AM, cfuture wrote

Thanks for the link to idevcloud Jim.
"What might have been..."

Frank Soltis, genius that he is, said once in a presentation at a local
users' group meeting that his biggest regret was deciding not to include
a GUI for the system, thinking that a business system had no need for
it. I think I heard it right. But during the time he was making that
decision, if this is true, that probably would have been at least 95
percent of the midrange market...

--Alan



Jim Oberholtzer wrote:

Keep your eye on http://www.idevcloud.com for the developer micro
partitioning on IBM i.

As to the other points I agree that "smart terminals" AKA thin clients
are the future with the main processing and storage back in the data
center where it is better managed and the cost of ownership is much lower.

Funny, that's what Rochester tried to do with the 5250 terminal back in
the late 70s. Put a floppy/hard drive on it and allow the internal
processor to do more than just serve up 24*80 line screens. The IBM
boys in Boca Raton, FL grabbed that idea and the IBM PC was born about a
year later........ Ya gotta wonder what might have been.....

Jim Oberholtzer
CEO/Chief Technical Architect
Agile Technology Architects, LLC


On 6/13/2010 6:06 PM, cfuture wrote:

*This message was transferred with a trial version of CommuniGate(r) Pro*

And it will happen again. Every 10 years or so. Watch...the next hot thing will be client server!

---
Thin clients will stay, because they are easier to upgrade or downgrade
or fix and fast to reboot, all the rest. They are going to slowly take
desktops over from our present desktop models, because of those issues.

But we like having our own playground, so we'll get a micro-partition on
the server. We could use a micro-partition setup on the i, that would be
fantastic for developers. It would also make it easier to do
client-server stuff and all the etcetera stuff.

So we won't let the PC go very quickly, there is also the inertia factor.

But then thin clients will start getting USB ports, like the article
talked about, they will start sprouting all over. Besides the exotic
devices in the article. storage devices will rack up local desktop
storage again.

So there you go.

--aec

On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 2:27 PM, sjl<sjl_abc@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

We have finally come full circle in the PC world:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/microsoft-reinvents-the-mainframe/2184?tag=nl.e589

"...Where Microsoft's ambition was once to put a PC on every desktop, in
2010 they'll settle for delivering a desktop to you over a network, on a
device that might or might not be a PC. That's an enormous change."