I have a suggestion of the answer. I suppose someone could get a confirmation lose but it would be from some pretty cagey folks who have made obscene amounts of money.
Lexis/Nexis, in an effort to deal with the complete lack of optimized solutions for dealing with massive search and inddexing problems... They took several IBM mainframes beginning with the old 370 architecture days and put them together in what today would be a cluster. At the time it was all big iron, and there was no O/S per se, it was all customized IBM assembler. Today the core iron is still all IBM, but the outer edges are all client/server worstations and servers. It is apparently configured in a massively parallel configuration around the IBM mainframe core.
I would propose that the core IBM mainframe code has changed only incrementally over time, and hence is probably the some of the oldest code in the industry still running. I guess logic would prevent one from assuming that no changes have been made as the hardware has been upgraded, but that core code has got to be ancient.
mdw;-)
In the slashdot world I would guess that just the beta tags on this post should get the article a flamebait, or troll modifier.
But then again.... your mileage may vary.;-)
I guess my thought would be related to MS' ability to push out DRM, license content, and other stuff.
I guess in 2001, I saw no ability on their part to push out ground breaking stuff at any clip. At the time I think it would have been difficult for even MW to come up with a credible DRM platform on the desktop. Further I'm not sure they can execute on a strategy of low end consumer devices where the profit is made in content which they can somehow get in position to license. Yeah, I suppose one might observe that they did this with O/S sw, but I don't think it is the same thing for content. Think about it, although I know given the same innvovative nature as Apple they could have easily convinced BMG, Columbia, etc into licensing, and they would have been great at pressuring the labels, but they would have failed totally on the platform side. Finally based on observation they would have been impatient with the consumer device profit margins.
Nah, unless the tiger could have changed it's stripes, they could not have changed the outcome.
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I have a suggestion of the answer. I suppose someone could get a confirmation lose but it would be from some pretty cagey folks who have made obscene amounts of money. Lexis/Nexis, in an effort to deal with the complete lack of optimized solutions for dealing with massive search and inddexing problems... They took several IBM mainframes beginning with the old 370 architecture days and put them together in what today would be a cluster. At the time it was all big iron, and there was no O/S per se, it was all customized IBM assembler. Today the core iron is still all IBM, but the outer edges are all client/server worstations and servers. It is apparently configured in a massively parallel configuration around the IBM mainframe core. I would propose that the core IBM mainframe code has changed only incrementally over time, and hence is probably the some of the oldest code in the industry still running. I guess logic would prevent one from assuming that no changes have been made as the hardware has been upgraded, but that core code has got to be ancient. mdw ;-)
In the slashdot world I would guess that just the beta tags on this post should get the article a flamebait, or troll modifier. But then again.... your mileage may vary. ;-)
I guess my thought would be related to MS' ability to push out DRM, license content, and other stuff. I guess in 2001, I saw no ability on their part to push out ground breaking stuff at any clip. At the time I think it would have been difficult for even MW to come up with a credible DRM platform on the desktop. Further I'm not sure they can execute on a strategy of low end consumer devices where the profit is made in content which they can somehow get in position to license. Yeah, I suppose one might observe that they did this with O/S sw, but I don't think it is the same thing for content. Think about it, although I know given the same innvovative nature as Apple they could have easily convinced BMG, Columbia, etc into licensing, and they would have been great at pressuring the labels, but they would have failed totally on the platform side. Finally based on observation they would have been impatient with the consumer device profit margins. Nah, unless the tiger could have changed it's stripes, they could not have changed the outcome.