Mainframe & thin-client (was Re: Microsoft good press over Longhorn)
On Sun, 2002-11-03 at 01:14, cr wrote:
> On Sun, 02 Nov 2003 23:37, Paul Johnson wrote:
> > On Sat, Nov 01, 2003 at 05:13:01PM +0000, Pigeon wrote:
> > > Nah, that was EDIT.COM - before that appeared I used to use the Turbo
> > > C editor to edit text files; I think the guys who wrote EDIT.COM did
> > > too.
> >
> > I remember c:\dos\edit.com fondly as well, probably the best text
> > editor to ever come out of MS. Still doesn't hold a flame to emacs,
> > but hey, it's Microsoft we're talking about here, so what do you expect?
>
> Well, I discovered Edit when our department got a IBM PC with a dot-matrix
> printer. At that time we engineers had to write specifications on a
> mainframe terminal in some 'scripting' language, send them off to some queue,
> phone up Accounts (who owned the mainframe) and beg them nicely to run some
> compiler on it and send it to the Print queue, then phone up Printing and
> tell them it was ours. If we were lucky, next day, we'd get the result and
> (if we'd made no mistakes in our scripting!) it would be readable. If not...
>
> Nobody told me about Edit, I found it by accident. But as soon as I saw it
> I recognised The Future. Or, Freedom. I printed off one page to prove to
> myself that it would work, went to the mainframe terminal, logged in, typed
> "Change Password", shut my eyes and typed in random letters, locking myself
> out of the detested mainframe forever. :)
>
> Does anyone wonder why I hate Thin Clients...? ;)
I hate to use such strong words, but to compare the centralized
control of resources that existed on *old* mainframes with the
centralized control of resources on a thin-client/fat-server and
find any but the most basic similarities is verging on delusion.
After all, it's no more difficult to have a printer sitting on your
desk, or down the hall with a TC/FS network-based system as it is
when you have stand-alone or fat-client/thin-server system. And
you're still running all the same apps, no matter what.
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Ron Johnson, Jr. ron.l.johnson@cox.net
Jefferson, LA USA
Causation does NOT equal correlation !!!!!!!!
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