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On 1/1/2011 11:26 AM, Maurice O'Prey wrote:
Joe
How much memory would a machine running PC-Dos (or MS-DOS) these days need
to run efficiently (not a lot in my reckoning?), and what would the
performance be like, would this be similar to an IBM i?
I'm not even sure where to take this particular question, Maurice. A
single-user MS-DOS machine compared to an IBM i? How do these even
compare? One runs an enterprise, the other runs (maybe) a store front.
How do you compare these?
If you want to go old school, perhaps the best comparison would be an
MP/M machine back in the day compared to, say, a System/3. (To those of
you not as ancient as me, MP/M was the multi-user equivalent of CP/M,
which was the forerunner of the DOS systems that eventually grew up to
be Windows.) Even back then MP/M required 64K just to run a couple of
users, while a good System/3 ran on 32K (64K if you were going with
CCP!), and ran lots more jobs and more users as well.
OS/400 is good because nobody can mess with it (and why should they?) But
that doesn't imply superiority over others where they can. So what do you
do, stick with something that works, or invent something new?
What the IBM i brings to the table (and not to sound like Trevor, but
OS/400 is a really, really outdated name now, which is why I just refer
to the IBM i) is a way to run hundreds or thousands of users on powerful
applications with limited memory. Meanwhile, Windows tends to go the
other direction where even basic workstations require gigabytes of
memory. Some of it makes sense, I guess. It's interesting that you
bring up music, because multimedia machines now require 64-bit Windows
because they need more than 4GB of memory to run efficiently. But come
on - why do you need a gigabyte of RAM to run Office? Just wondering.
(It is reckoned by some that Leo Fender got it right first time with the
Fender Stratocaster, so why change anything ever?)
Not sure what your point is. If you talk to a lot of guitarists, they
insist that tubes still sound better than transistors for amplifiers.
As a keyboard player I can say with authority that guitarists are
weird. Of course, a guitarist would disagree. In fact, the only thing
keyboard players and guitarists agree on is that drummers are REALLY
strange <grin>.
But to your point, the Strat is far from static. Even though the basic
design is the same, it has changed quite a bit, in some cases
substantially, whether it's the construction of the neck or the
configuration of the pickups (humbucker, anyone?). In that way, the
comparison to the IBM i actually quite apropos - a groundbreaking
architecture that continues to evolve and provide new functionality,
while at the same time running workloads on a single machine that
require banks of servers in just about any other design. That is what
makes the IBM i superior. In my opinion.
Joe
midrange.com
