Mini & Mainframe Power Requirements

From: William Donzelli <william_at_ans.net>
Date: Sun Jan 18 20:49:27 1998

> Well not necessarily. Of late IBM has been putting effort into making
> S/390 (note: less than 7 years old and not quite a classic) available
> to small shops: via the P/390 (a 7490 mainframe on a chip hosted by a pentium
> running OS/2) and the R/390 (also a 7490 with an AIX host - RS/6k or PPC).
> I must apologize: in a previous message I had referred to the mainframe on
> a chip as a "3490" which is a tape drive not a CPU model number.

Yes, and in time I will probably want an S/390.

It seems to be a trend to make scaled-back machines for office
environments. The most suprising is Cray, with their EL and J series
machines, that just need 240V.

And I lust for either of them as well.
 
> At any rate keep an eye out for P/390 on a PC Server 500 (maybe the P90s will
> wind up on the used market?) and the equivalent R/390 machine - they take only
> wall plug 110 AC and will let you hack JCL, assembler, and CLISTs to your
> heart's content - destined to be classics.

Actually, I am interested in the big IBM stuff mostly for the hardware.
IBM software, in my opinion, is rather bad - operating systems to
software. The magic is all under the sheet metal in the form of fab
techniques that are consistantly about 5 years ahead of the rest of
the world. The architectures also tend to be fascinating.

William Donzelli
william_at_ans.net
Received on Sun Jan 18 1998 - 20:49:27 GMT