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.

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John Markoff, The New York Times' technology journalist, even compared today's situation to the historic transition from the mainframe to the personal computer.

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The hardware progression has been from the mainframe to the personal computer to more powerful clustered servers, with cost and access moving back and forth between large enterprises and corporations to small businesses and individuals.

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Just as the personal computer freed workers from the tyranny of the mainframe and its persnickety administrators, ADS-B frees pilots from relying on ground controllers to dictate their every maneuver.

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Having been designed from the start for use on a personal computer rather than a powerful workstation or even a mainframe, Tsunami and Typhoon use memory extremely efficiently.

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It then moved on to mainframe circuit-boards and terminals and eventually to personal computers.

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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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