The early IBM mainframe computers were so expensive that only big companies could own them.
The problem extends far beyond mainframe computers, though not always with such serious consequences.
They looked at the world of mainframe computers run by professional programmers and thought, anybody can have this.
They are not much different than the 1970s-era dumb terminals that dialed by modem to connect with mainframe computers.
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In the 1970s and early 1980s, for instance, firms stocked up on the new thing at the time, mainframe computers.
The days when IBM's mainframe computers held a monopoly on enterprise computing may have ended with the influx of cheaper x86 and Unix servers.
When mainframe computers arrived and television was what kids liked, the mind was like a mainframe and television was the engine of our idiocy.
As an Internet guy, these small fission reactors seem to me like the microprocessors that took over from the huge, air-conditioned, glasshouse mainframe computers.
Now it is getting easier as banking moves from bespoke mainframe computers to racks of smaller servers that can be scaled up as needed.
But Dell's risk is that the march grinds to a halt as it approaches the proprietary bastions of storage, mainframe computers, switches and networking equipment.
But Dell's risk is that the march will grind to a halt as it approaches the proprietary bastions of storage, mainframe computers, switches and networking equipment.
Using mainframe computers and low-wage workers in Korea, he rekeyboarded the contents of 70 years of Readers Guides and reorganized the material alphabetically rather than chronologically.
Many of those programs are still being used in some older PC software and large mainframe computers -- used by government agencies, universities, Wall Street and businesses worldwide.
Despite its high-tech sheen, medicine looks a lot like some of the dinosaur industries that were upended by competition from unexpected sources: autos in the 1970s, for example, or mainframe computers in the 1980s.
The shares trade at a PE ratio of about 14 and more than twice sales, just as it reported a worrisome drop in sales of big-ticket items, like mainframe computers, and some slowing of software sales.
The present generation of factory robots is akin to early mainframe computers in offices, reckons Rodney Brooks, a co-founder of iRobot, an American firm whose products include the Roomba, a robotic vacuum-cleaner, as well as military robots.
The pattern began in the 1950s, when hugely expensive mainframe computers were first used to save correspondingly huge sums in information-intensive functions in the financial-services industry, then in accounting, payroll and inventory-control tasks in other big organisations.
The battle between local storage and shared storage has a long history, back to the very beginnings of the personal computer industry, when small computers with local storage began to replace dumb terminals connected to centralized mainframe computers.
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Its immediate objective should be to validate and bring to bear automated techniques for addressing in the most cost-effective and least time-consuming manner possible the most daunting challenge: Making the Nation's civilian (government and private sector) and military mainframe computers Year 2000-compliant.
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What top executive would bet his company the way Tom Watson did IBM in the early 1950s on mainframe computers or the way Bill Gates bet Microsoft in the mid-1990s on Windows if he knew failure would tempt prosecutors, politicians and bureaucrats to destroy him?
He saw that the companies that made fourteen-inch drives for mainframe computers had been driven out of business by companies that made eight-inch drives for mini computers, and then the companies that made the eight-inch drives were driven out of business by companies that made 5.25-inch drives for PCs.
An innovative proposal has been offered by Dr. Morris Davis, the inventor of a program known as Transition Software that has demonstrated impressive capabilities to accomplish such corrective action on mainframe computers in a fraction of the time -- and at far less cost -- than is currently associated with human review of each line of code.
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Motivated by curiosity, boredom, and hunger for a little power, they range from the mildly annoying (such as the Hacking for Girlies group that brought down the New York Times site on the day the Starr Report came out) on up to the criminal "crackers" (such as Vladimir Levin, who allegedly transferred millions of dollars from Citibank's mainframe computers to accounts in Finland and Israel).
What top executive would bet his company the way Tom Watson did IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) in the early 1950s on mainframe computers, the way Bill Gates bet Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) in the mid-1990s on Windows, if he knew failure would tempt prosecutors, politicians and bureaucrats to destroy him?
Just as cheap personal computers undermined the mainframe business in the 1980s and open-source programs like Linux and Mysql are challenging Microsoft and Oracle today, outfits like Fastcase are attacking Wexis' stranglehold on legal research from the bottom up.
Just as the PC usurped the mainframe and set off explosive change in computers, new optical technologies may someday overtake electronics and topple the established telecom order.
It then moved on to mainframe circuit-boards and terminals and eventually to personal computers.
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