Nekochan Net

Lets hope that Larrys IBM hate will blind the cost of investing heavy in Sparc

/michael

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only so far as it feeds that baby: oracle db.

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DECUS Member 368596

well, if you're lamenting the passing of companies and not their products, and i don't think anyone really is here since they only mention a specific product of that company, the CLARiiON business (part of DG) was the only thing about their company that was a viable product i.e. a major part of the business. the AViiON wasn't worth anything since the NT server battle would not be won on proprietary hardware.

so let's be real here; what you call a peripheral is really a computer. all storage arrays have off-the-shelf processors in them just like a computer. a complicated OS, and layer applications that solve business problems. the CLARiiON is a computer, just as the AViiON was a computer. by this time the custom processor and their OS were a part of the minicomputer age, the AViiON was long past it's time to die.

you may go 'yeah, yeah, i knew that', but it's true, and a lot of people don't realize. that today's storage companies, are not just peripherals, they are computing-application platforms. they are as special purpose as it comes, and a huge revenue business. they solve business problems in data life cycle management that server companies can't.

solving business problems are what these companies do. they fail when their products can't compete, or their management makes a mistake, or their janitor rise up in revolt.

to me, other than a pass infatuation with products, the people the are employed at the business are more important then the products they sell. I'm glad DG found a home for their products and their employees in a company that can maintain their product line and the people.

anyway back to your regularly scheduled program; praising technology.

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DECUS Member 368596

No way, Sky ! You're too old-style ! Nowadays we can get all that crap done overseas for half the cost. All we need is a CEO to take home 50% of the net earnings in "bonuses", a Marketing Mouthpiece to spray the newsguzzlers with bullshit and a CFO to drag and drop those big fat sums from the 'Incoming' box to the 'Salaries and Bonuses and Offshore Accounts' box. Time to get with the times, home boy !

Did you know that all through the dot-com boom neither Cisco nor Microsoft paid a nickel in federal income taxes ?

I have had many computers at home, from PDP-8 and forward, one machine I have never had and also have never seen for sale is the coolest of them all in my mind since, the Eagle (Eclipse MV/8000) I will never forget when read the book about it in my first working years it was so good description of how the design of electronics(HW and SW) is that it amazed me. I tried that book on my wife, but she did not like it, strange

Where did all these machines go? I remember we had them for PCB layout then.

/michael

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No Microsoft product was used in any way to write or send this text.
If you use a Microsoft product to read it, you're doing so at your own
risk.

is that rhetorical?

the machines were scrapped.

the economics killed them. it's intel or nothing. and with intel, the rest is cookie cutter hardware.

it's a cookie cutter world now. value has 'moved up the stack' as we say. you can only add value higher in the computing ecosystem. the layer that all the hardware/os differentiation lived in is dead and gone as a commodity dominated by intel and the chip guys. the glamor is gone.

@hamei i believe i was referring to my own prerogatives, not managements. true ultimately the company comes first, and the people get the benefit of continued employment (that's very important lately), but a lot of managers value their people too. i would say more than 1/2?

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DECUS Member 368596

By the time AViiON came around DG was leaning more towards commodity anyway, especially with the Intel AViiON (although the 88k AViiON wasn't too special). Nova, Eclips and Eclipse/MV were the last computers where the company let the designers loose, so to speak.

I guess what I'm lamenting is the lifestyle where companies were able to let their people loose to attack problems in new ways rather than today's McDonald's computing. Within that vein I suppose I should start to think of storage and other "non-main-CPU" devices as the last refuge of multiple innovative approaches, correct?

In general there seems to be a mindset change from "invent/discover/reserach/etc. because it's there" to "do you have a business case for that? If not don't bother". It would be interesting to see the retrospective on our time about 200 years out (although it must be admitted that the large research lab without a very specific agenda is a product of a very limited time - late 1800s to the 1990s). According to Arendt, one of the hallmarks of the modern age is that you need to be very careful about using the past as a model, so it is also possble that retrospective is useless in this situation.

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Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

Systems available for remote access on request.

(single-CM)

they bought in to off the shelf cpu's because there is no sense in a company who builds platforms to invest in the skill and technology at the time to do their one cpu. cpu architecture at the time meant everyone ditch their own designs and bought into intel, mips, pcc, etc..

AViiON engineering focused on ccNUMA like eveyone else, and did complex chip designs for the non-cpu part of the machine.



what you call 'McDonalds' computing is just economics. the world can't support more than a few incredibly complex cpu designs. it never did. today there are fewer viable cpu types, more shared software because of it, and innovation has 'moved up the stack'. it's being done at the application and system level. we're doing things today with a greater mass of intellect available than we ever did back then. there is more innovation with a greater variety today because there are fewer people working at the low level doing basically redundant work, power, package, cooling, support design, etc...

i loved the old machines. but back then it took a couple of people to pull off most of the work. OS design was primitive, a program was a couple of K, the user interface as a '*' prompt not a whole GUI.

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DECUS Member 368596

Back when I used to work for an outsourcing company we ran several large ERP systems for various fortune 500 companies in our datacenter. I remember we had a data general 6600 with something like 6 pentium pro cpus and a couple of gigs of ram. Beautful machine that ran DGUX. That thing was just as good or better than the E3000 or K580s we were paying 2-300% more for. I think it ran for something like 2 years before some dipshit deleted the boot kernel. Actually, I think it was serveral months later we found that out when we went to reboot the server for something lol. good tech, good times.

Could have been a lot worse, you know. Microsoft could have bought them. Racks and racks full of Sun hardware worldwide running Windows Server ... mmmmm