My post provoked a good many responses, and I am happy thagt it did so. What is interesting about them is that the arguments against my view, many of them cogent, were bureaucratic, not technical.
One reason why mainframe shops are being supplanted by less effective and in particular less reliable technology is that they are usually much older and thus organizationally senescent too. They are managed for the most part by people who either 1) never understood the technology or, worse, 2) understood it well circa 1975. In the upshot these shops are bureaucratic, technically inadequate, shy of innovation, and risk-averse in general. The technology is not obsolete; the culture is, irretrievably so I fear. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
