[2082] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: NREN and the Economics of Mainframes Versus Workstations
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (sean mclinden)
Fri Jan 24 08:23:30 1992
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 92 06:37:12 -0500
From: sean@dsl.pitt.edu (sean mclinden)
To: com-priv@psi.com, drw@BOURBAKI.MIT.EDU
Suggestions that mainframe (or rather, centralized) computer services
are losing ground to distributed computing may be much more substantiable
in the academic/research center than in other areas. As Sun found out,
the problem with "the network *is* the computer" is that every user becomes
a systems manager unless:
1. Distributed resources are HEAVILY underutilized, as in the case
where people do primarily word processing or terminal emulation.
2. Remote systems management or automatic systems management makes it
easy for the user to ignore that aspect of computing.
There are also a few political factors, i.e., mainframe shops = large
chunks of real estate which equates with status and the fact that many
of the older school (and perhaps they are wiser than we) believe that
the economies still favor mainframe or supermini computing over distributed
personal workstations.
I suspect that part of the problem (besides the "experimental" nature
of the software) is that most users really do not think in metaphors which
easily allow them to fully utilize networks. Because of this, standalone
operation becomes much easier than true social computing except for more
basic (or transparent) services. For many other non-computing users (in
the home, for example), the model is "point-to-point" connection, such
as Dialog or CompuServe.
This, I believe, is one of the single biggest reasons why we haven't
seen a lot of end-user enthusiasm for national ISDN and the tariff
changes which would permit it to become a reality. If you don't
*think* in terms of a network, what does ISDN (or Internet, or
distributed computing), *really* mean.
Those of you who think that mainframe computing and timesharing is
dying just go to your local hospital MIS department and ask them to
itemize their capital budget expenses for computing for the last
three and next three years. I can almost guarantee that somewhere
in there will be and IBM ES/9000, and a whole lot of PCs with ProComm
or SmartTerm.
Sean McLinden
