Tim wrote:
Tim:
And I'm sure that all the mainframe guys must laugh their asses off
at businesses which have to go around updating hundreds or thousands
of stand-alone terminals, compared to updating one server and doing
nothing to all the dumb terminals.
John Summerfield:
And those of us who know how to update masses of Windows systems will be
laughing at people like you who don't.
http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&q=wsus+site%3Amicrosoft.com
I'm quite well aware that there's techniques for central management.
But whether someone really goes around personally doing it, or plays
around with some form of central automation, doesn't negate the point
that networked computers, like mainframes, simply don't have to do
anything like that. ;-p
A mainframe with dumb terminals still has advantages even over thin
clients, which have to cope with getting different hardware to fit in.
Not all thin clients are identical, you can end up with a plethora of
configurations to handle them all.
I'm well aware of mainframes too, I even remember the Bunch.
People I know of who use mainframes & dumb terminals seem to use Windows
boxes and terminal emulators. It's what I used when i worked at a bank a
while back, and when Mr & Mrs S were last at the (different) bank
discussing loans, the "terminal" was labelled "Dell" and ran Windows and
a 3270 terminal emulator.
AFAIK if one's writing programs for the latest versions of DOS and OS
then one has to use ispf or equivalent to edit programs, and do all
one's work on the mainframe, but if the mainframe's running Linux (quite
likely), then it's hard to beat doing the development on one's actual
PC. Mainframe CPUs are good at some things, but CPU-intensive work is
better done elsewhere, and adding PCs scales better.
However, I find the greatest burden of updating software is not actually
applying the fixes, but reviewing them, and mainframe or peecee, I'd be
doing that.
--
Cheers
John
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