Re: What to buy?

"Joerg" <invalid@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:7ntc69F3mnt88U1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The great news is that you can easily buy ISA motherboards, brand new ones.

Even 5 years ago there were still places doing PDP-11 support -- sometimes
having re-engineered, e.g., option card boards from scratch and using modern
FPGAs -- but I'm not sure if they're still around.

It might have been their last useful OS for quite a while. But I won't judge
Win 7 before I've seen it. The fact that native support for old apps is gone
does not bode well though.

Microsoft has never had the "backwards compatibility will last forever"
business model that, e.g., IBM has with System/360 introduced in 1964
(although even there, my understanding is that older System/360 software is
sometimes running under a virtual machine today rather than natively -- it's
just that IBM has had virtual machine technology deployed for decades now with
VM/CMS and whatnot so no one even notices, whereas with PCs it's become the
Hot New Thing just a handful of years ago). When it comes right down to it I
think a certain amount of their business model *is* planned obsolescence...
and as a company primarily selling software (unlike IBM, which primary sells
services these days) -- and with a voracious appetite for cashflow (given
their size) -- I can kinda see their thinking. And keep in mind that the
mainstream Windows world of 32-bit applications began with Windows 95 in...
1995, so that's 14 years that customers have had to get their software ported
before 16-bit and DOS support was pulled, after all. (And it'll certainly be
another 5+ years before XP licenses become scarce, I imagine.)

Note that Apple isn't really that much better in this regard.

There is, of course, Linux... the OS is all open-source; no one will ever be
able to tell you you can't use it anymore! Maybe that $100k is better spent
on porting apps to Linux than buying copies of Win7?

---Joel


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: What to buy?
    ... business model that, e.g., IBM has with System/360 introduced in 1964. ... and as a company primarily selling software -- and with a voracious appetite for cashflow -- I can kinda see their thinking. ... And keep in mind that the mainstream Windows world of 32-bit applications began with Windows 95 in... ... Maybe that $100k is better spent on porting apps to Linux than buying copies of Win7? ...
    (sci.electronics.design)
  • IBM, Canonical/Ubuntu, Novell, Red Hat to Deliver Microsoft-Free Desktops Worldwide
    ... For the first time, IBM and leading Linux distributors Canonical/Ubuntu, ... partners to deliver Microsoft-free personal computing choices with Lotus ... lower cost hardware than new Microsoft technology. ...
    (comp.sys.mac.advocacy)
  • Fw: LINUX on the MAINFRAME
    ... Re: LINUX on the MAINFRAME ... algorithm allocation a new storage location on every assignment. ... (managing virtual machine memory as virtual paged memory). ...
    (bit.listserv.ibm-main)
  • Re: Why Linux is blind to this ARP reply ?
    ... I'm wondering if Linux does not "like" something about the arp reply. ... that the returned IBM MAC address is, in fact, the MAC of the IBM ... to place a route in a policy routing table. ...
    (comp.os.linux.misc)
  • Re: Linux zSeries questions
    ... I also am very familiar with the VM and Linux link. ... IBM did not write LINUX, in any way shape or form. ... They were 'late' jumping on the LINUX band-wagon. ... painting MVS with, why don't you do some research and verify your facts. ...
    (bit.listserv.ibm-main)