ggw@wolves.uucp (Gregory G. Woodbury) (11/27/89)
The discussion comes around again to some personal opinions about the effectiveness of having a "workstation" (a.k.a "killer micro") on the desk versus the use of a centralized computing facility. In each case it should be noted that some situations will do better with a shared central facility, and others will do better with the individual workstation. I will not claim that (at work at the university) that we are making the most effective use of the individual workstations that we decided to go with -- there IS a LOT of wasted time when the machines are not doing completely useful work. HOWEVER, the cost of having the workstations in house (all costs!) is far lower than trying to use the university owned "mainframe". We may suffer with a low i/o bandwidth (due to the inherent limitations of the "pc" platform) but even so, we can shift things around and keep going if one machine is busy with production. Several years ago, (when we got the first KM) the first weekend of its installed life it did one of our studies that PAID its direct costs in terms of time charges on the "mainframe". As time passes, and the programmers become accustomed to the "tool" concept of UNIX* we are developing more and more utilities that make life without the mainframe (and SAS ;-) more enjoyable. It is now to the point that as we need more capacity, we can just replace one KM at at time and keep going. (e.g. dump an orphaned CLIPPER and put an 88K in its place.) The anecdotal accounts are wonderful, and we need to keep seeing them, but we need to also realize that not all situations can be described with "sweeping statements" and more situations may be amenable to the distributed methods than some can easily think of. -- Gregory G. Woodbury Sysop/owner Wolves Den UNIX BBS, Durham NC UUCP: ...dukcds!wolves!ggw ...dukeac!wolves!ggw [use the maps!] Domain: ggw@cds.duke.edu ggw@ac.duke.edu ggw%wolves@ac.duke.edu Phone: +1 919 493 1998 (Home) +1 919 684 6126 (Work) [The line eater is a boojum snark! ] <standard disclaimers apply>