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William Sherman wrote:
>
> It is kind of funny to hear people rave about things like VM and "The
> Cloud". IBM was using VM 30 years ago. You sat down at a terminal,
> logged
> in, and all your stuff was there. I was in Raleigh once, had a bad
> feeling,
> and found I was gone. I called a friend in Boca, said I had three
> personal
> files I'd like deleted, gave him the password. He logged in, had my VM,
> and
> removed the personal files so that they remained personal.
>
> Much of this neat stuff people find amazing today was being done a lot
> time
> ago. Instant message? IBM had a two line Tell area at the bottom of the
> screen to IM anyone on the system. The current texting language may
> not
> have been invented in Tell but it was definitely used there. After all,
> u
> only hd abt 70 char @ a tme so u md t mst of wht u wrte, dyk? The
> Cloud?
> Everything used to be on "The Cloud", some server in some place we had
> no
> idea of, unless you were directly connected to the group overseeing the
> server.
>
> The difference today is we have a GUI and most connections wireless,
> but it
> is all the same stuff really.
Everything old is new again...
But, back in the day, I'd like to have seen you INSTALL
virtual machine instances of each of several other
operating systems (from other vendors) on that mainframe.
And then, I'd like to have seen you sitting out on your
back deck (do you have a pool? in this fantasy you can
lounge by your pool...) at home, or at your cottage or
at some hotel, with the company laptop, blithely connecting
to all the things you needed or wanted, to do your job.
When I'm too lazy to walk down the hall to a cow-orker's
cubicle, and don't want to compose an e-mail, I just
fire up Office Communicator and initiate a chat that
can include cut'n'pasted material, links to files,
and other supporting material, with no text-length
limitations. I can elect to have the whole conversation
recorded, or I can save selected portions for future use.
(No, not usually blackmail... why do you ask?)
If I want to run a meeting with participation from several
people who are at distant offices, or travelling on business,
or working from home (including me...), I can just use
GoToMeeting to share my desktop view with every attendee,
simultaneously. They don't need to have any of my tools
installed, and they don't need access to any restricted
files I might all up, but they can see what I want to show.
Doesn't sound a lot like what I remember of mainframe days.
Taking a different tack, look at massive computational
tasks like protein folding, farmed out and shared across
tens of thousands of personal computers during their
slack-cycle times.
Back in the day, you (well, your IT department) would
have needed to purchase and install huge and hugely
expensive additional computing, memory, and storage
components in order to attack a similar task.
And I can't say I was sorry to leave behind the days
of 7x12 green-on-black character cells. I admit it was
fun to construct ASCII and EBCDIC character "art". :-)
-k
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