On Sat, Sep 25, 1999 at 08:18:51PM +1200, Russell McMahon wrote:
> Sun "Sun Ray 1 network appliance"
>
> I thought it must be April 1st up there in the Northern hemisphere but
> apparently not :-)
> I'm still not sure that they are not pulling my leg.
> Talk about full circle.
> Sorry, no PICs here - but a top end PIC would be just about good enough :-)
>
> NO local computing whatsoever.
> 8M RAM
> No local storage
>
> PS For the young - look up the following words in a computer dictionary. It
> looks like they are going to prove useful (again)
>
> Dumb terminal.
> Main frame.
> Dinosaur.

Perhaps you've not tried to support devices *with*
local storage and computing in a clerical application,
e.g. airline ticket agent, insurance claims processor,
auto repair shop workorder tracking, large retail outlet,
etc. In very many applications, distributed computing and
storage offers a laundry list of negatives with almost no
positives. Suppose that you had 2000 people working in an
insurance claims office. Why would you put something like
a disk drive at each of the 2000 desks? Western Digital's
MTBF spec for an EIDE hard disk is 300,000 hours. With
two thousand drives in service, one can then expect a
failure on average once a week. And with the tendancy of
stochastic processes to cluster, what you can *really*
expect is the occasional Very Bad Week with a half-dozen
failures, each of which can be quite disruptive.  (I've
done computer support for a group of 350 users for fifteen
years and can tell you that it really does work this way).
Add something like Microsoft Windows (a stochastic process
in and of itself) into the mix and worse, buggy Windows
applications, and it adds up to a sizable staff of people
who do very little but scurry about fixing problems for
people who don't even *care* what kind of stupid computer
they have as long as they can code their quota of insurace
forms for the day and get home in time to have dinner with
the family.  Offices are harsh, difficult environments
for something as complex as a computer. They are dusty
and unaffordable to cool 24x7. They inhabited by klutzes
that trip over power cords and spill coffee and visited
nightly by cleaning people looking for places to plug
in the vaccuum.  Factory floors, repair shops, garages,
airports and so on are of course even worse.

Mainframes are excellent solutions for these kinds of
applications, and they never really went away. PCs and
such came into favor because it was difficult to get
enough computing capacity in the mainframe and networking
bandwidth out to the desktops to support graphical
interfaces; thus the primary role of the PC was to
provide the processing in support of the user interface.
The mainframes still provided the back-end data
storage and much of the application processing.
However, it is now quite straightforward to build a
mainframe and supporting networks with the capacity
to do that kind of work, and the desktop computer
option looks less and less attractive all the time.

There is a huge market for systems to support these
kinds of applications, and Sun is getting filthy rich
selling them.

--Bob

--
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Bob Drzyzgula                             It's not a problem
bob@drzyzgula.org                until something bad happens
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        http://www.drzyzgula.org/bob/electronics/
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