[SunRescue] Tape drive

[Ken Hansen]

Side story:

I was once in a pharmacy, picking up a prescription for my son, and this man
at the counter was enraged - he had just spent $125 on a small bottle of
heart pills (say it was 18 - 24 pills inside).

He looks at me and wants me to see what $125 worth of pills looks like, so
he rips open the bottle bag and shows me the pill bottle. I have to admint,
it was hard for me to consider that handfull of tic-tac looking bits was
$125...

I nodded and shrugged, as if to say, what are you going to do? then paid for
my son's medicine ($32.50 price, reduced to a $5 copay) and left.

When I got to the car, a few things were clear to me:

    1) When your life is on the line, you'll pay whatever is needed.
    2) Invest in Pharmacy companies. ;^)

Back on topic - IBM get their prices, because that is an accurate measure of
their worth to the organizations that buy from IBM. Companies aren't dumb,
and the people that specify these things aren't dumb. They have to prove
that spending the half-million on an AS/400 will either save the company
enough money to cover the cost, or, *prevent* the company from going out of
business.

IBM doesn not sell pieces to people, it sells solutions to organizations.
When you stop and think about an IBM 3090-class mainframe running Linux to
support 20,000 individual system images running on demand in real-time, you
start to understand that you can not compare what mainframes do to what
other "conventional" boxes can do.

An IBM box may not make the best standalone single-user system around, but
I'll tell you what - they *are* the best at what they do, and what they do
has prescious little to do with what most people use their computers for...

Ken
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bill Bradford" <mrbill at mrbill.net>
To: <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Sent: Monday, May 21, 2001 12:16 AM
Subject: Re: [SunRescue] Tape drive


> On Sun, May 20, 2001 at 11:23:13PM -0400, Ken Hansen wrote:
> > MVS is a fabulous environment. It is not a place to hang around and
tinker,
> > but every tool you would want *for peoduction work* is available.
> > You need deep pockets to run MVS - the software licenses are *huge*.
>
> This is IBM in general - I saw a PO for the latest release of
> OS/400 and the new machine they installed at work - was on the
> order of $500K...
>
> bill
>
> --
> Bill Bradford
> mrbill at mrbill.net
> Austin, TX
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