[geeks] Windows on a mainframe? Why???

[Sridhar Ayengar]

Lionel Peterson wrote:
> Can't speak to S-L-O-W, but I can say that it seems to be fighting the
> basic design of the mainframe and instead wasting cycles to make it
> act like a $10,000 Windows Terminal Server.

It would be slow because it would be fighting the basic design of the 
mainframe.  8-)  A mainframe isn't optimized for this kind of processing.

> I remember years ago (20?) when I saw that you could feed an X11
> display from a mainframe session, it didn't make any sense then (so no
> one did it), and it still makes no sense.

There is a tiny niche of problems that can be better solved by feeding 
Xterminals from a mainframe.  The niche served by this product is a tiny 
subset niche of *that* niche.

They claim to be able to support 3,000 Windows sessions with a modern 
mainframe.  Even using the admittedly somewhat pointless method of using 
a mainframe to provide X clients over a network to an X server, a 
mainframe should be able to reasonably support multiple orders of 
magnitudes more sessions than that.  This is patent garbage, due to its 
inefficiency (which they claim is good, but isn't).

Peace...  Sridhar