[rescue] Mac Appliance

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

On Fri, Aug 03, 2001 at 10:22:06PM -0400, Ken Hansen wrote:
> Funny story - Remember MCI Friends & Families program, reduced rates for
> calling certain numbers (your friends and families)? Well, when that program
> rolled out, it was managed on a 486 Comaq desktop computer...
> 
> I can only assume that machine was running windows (mid 80's)...

Umm 486 came out later than the mid-80's ...

> The "trick" to making this work on such a low-end machine, is that the
> processing is done "off-line", after the call completes but *before* the
> bill is cut...

I heard it ran on Nextstep/486 boxes.  When I worked for a small Nextstep
software reseller, MCI was one of the biggest customers (aside from
three-letter-agency folks, who we always assumed were buying for the NSA).

The key was multithreading, and the object-relational mapping with the
database driver kit that Next included with NS.  Think "ODBC done right"
(and before Microsoft came out with ODBC).

So the data searches were done on big Oracle or Sybase boxes, and each agent
had a NS system in front of him/her.

./patrick