On Thu, 30 Oct 2025 18:15:41 -0500, Enzo Damato <[email protected]> wrote:
(snip) >While previously, any company of decent size that wanted reliability and >performance over a certain threshold would have to hit up their local >IBM sales representative, this changed with the PC revolution around >1995ish, when Linux or Windows NT combined with high speed networking >made it possible to achieve decent reliability and >decent performance for a fraction of the cost. Critically, they also >allowed you to start small! This >(https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Google%E2%80%99s_First_Production_Server.jpg) >was google's first server rack! The discussion about weather or not >google would run better on a mainframe is pointless. Google's first >servers were a bunch of home brew computers attached to a surplus rack. >In no universe would they ever have been able to afford a mainframe, and >the IBM sales rep would have likely laughed them out of the room. > (snip) >Enzo Damato > When I saw the 1995 time frame mentioned, I decided to offer up some relevant history that occurred before Enzo's birth. I moved over to IBM's PC Server division from the mainframe technical marketing support side in 1994 to work as part of a team on bringing a hybrid server solution that included the P/390 emulator card (still in development) to market so that more PC Server hardware could be sold (since that was the primary goal of the PC Server division). A simplified summary of how things went down... "Stay in your lane PC Servers! We own the mainframe market," said S/390 hardware division. "Show us your less than 10 MIP strategy," said my PC Server bosses to them. "We don't have one. " "Ok. Then kindly step out of the way so we can sell more PC Servers." "But we control all the mainframe software you need," said the software division. "Would you like to protect software revenue from software that you already own?" "Yes," said the software division. "Then how about we work together on a solution?" And the result in 1995 was the PC Server 500 S/390 and the introduction of Entry Support Level (ESL) pricing for most S/390 software. It was a good thing to help slow some low-end erosion, but did nothing to help growth. IBM was already allowing the AS/400 division to eat the small mainframe customer market, and it did far more damage to the low-end mainframe market than PC Servers ever did to it in my opinion. -- Gary Eheman ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
