Happy Australia Day
The anniversary of the landing of the First Fleet under Captain Arthur Phillip at Port Jackson in New South Wales on January 26th, 1788.
Here’s the official site, and more information at Wikipedia.
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28 comments
It was a nice day for it. 😉
… Unless you are an Aussie Cricket fan that is. *sigh*
Lot of new Aussies received their citizenship certificate which most will put in a nice frame and hang somewhere prominent. *shrug* LOL
I just saved my friend I’m building the new site for over $30/mth on the hosting fees he’s been paying for the past few years. Seems the plan he was on was discontinued some time ago and fees have, of course, been dropping. He never checked. *sigh* He was on a limited plan for almost $50/Mth, now he get’s an unlimited plan for about $15/Mth. It pays to check. 😉
I should have a working test site up by the end of the week he and some other testers can play with for awhile to make sure it all works as planned. If it doesn’t, this may be my last post as I’ll go shoot myself. LOL In any case, the next few days are going to be hectic. 🙂
I hear that. When there are problems after launch you have a hell of time figuring out if its your code, a configuration option, or a version difference at the host site.
Good luck.
It wasn’t a very good day for Australia’s sport. You would have thought people would have been nicer about it being Australia Day.
Ah, the land of Aus! Sorry about the sports results; those things happen sometimes, even on special days.
I once almost got a gig (a music job) in Sydney, but the deal fell through. Now I’ll never make it there, but I still think fondly of the place.
Good luck with the web site, Kryten. Don’t shoot yourself; no site is worth that!
Steve Bates´s last blog post..Krugman Debunks The Cheap Shots
At this point if they don’t suddenly figure out how to teleport people, I don’t want to go anywhere. My days of flights that last longer than a day are over.
Hi guys. Thanks. 🙂
I posted the above before I saw the evening news and weather report. Seems we gave just begun our hottest week on record for the past century! Going to be in the 40’s C all week until late Sunday. I don’t have A/C here, so I don’t know how much work I’ll get done. I also just discovered that the hosting company my friend uses is way behind in updates. They use Apache 1.3, MySQL 4.1 & PHP 4.4. Synce the new site is based upon Joomla 1.5 & vTiger CRM which requires Apache 2 and PHP 5 as an absolute minimum… I’ll probably have to find a new hosting service now also. *shrug* Since this isn’t a dedicated host box, I doub’t very much they will update over the next few days to accommodate us and probably upset all the other clients being co-hosted. I also discovered that this Aussie host service in fact uses servers in Texas anyway.
So, if anyone has any recommendations for a good host with good support and is reasonably up-to-date and flexible… let me know. 🙂 TIA
I decided to watch the semi-final of the Womens Aus Open Tennis match between Jelena Dokic (playing for Aus after in her first Grand Slam tournament since 2003, ranked 179) and Russia’s Safina (3rd seed) after defeating Anna Chakvetadze (17th seed), Caroline Wozniacki (11th seed) and Alisa Kleybanova (29th seed). an amazing performance for someone who hasn’t played a serious tournament in a long time and seeded so far down the ranks. 🙂 She played with an amazing heart and some truly amazing shots. I think it’s safe to say, she’s back! I look forward to watching her improve over the coming year. 🙂 She did well against Safina and it went to the wire. A good match. 🙂
Steve, you didn’t miss much m8! 😀 😉 Nobody thinks fondly of Sydney, especially if if they’ve lived there more than a year! LOL (and I lived there over 3 years). Melbourne, is another story! 😉 LOL (Well… when we aren’t having a scorching heatwave anyway). 😉 I think of Sydney kinda like NYC… it’s a great place to visit… 😉
As for our once famed and feared cricket team… this was inevitable really. 🙂 A lot of the best senior players have retired the past year, and so the team has a lot of new young players. It will take them awhile to find their feet. We have ruled the Cricked World since about ’89. It was bound to end one day. We’ll be back! LOL
I use Nearlyfreespeech.net as the best solution for the type of things I’m doing and it runs Apache 2+, PhP 5, and mySQL 5, but there are some things it won’t run, like SSL, because they don’t assign dedicated IP addresses.
It’s a nice place for prototyping, but it isn’t the place for a high traffic site. You need to read their FAQs for more info. It is not hosting for the masses as they expect you to know what you are doing. You can get there by clicking on their logo on my left sidebar on the bottom.
It’s a nice place for prototyping, but it isn’t the place for a high traffic site.
Let me echo Bryan’s recommendation. NearlyFreeSpeech.net is my blog host, and I’ve prototyped one Apache/PHP/MySQL job for a small client there, but I don’t think I would select them for a mission-critical, must-run-24×7 app for a large client. Their good attitude and low prices are worth a lot, but I’m not sure they have the resources for a big, high-traffic site. And they seem to have occasional frustrations with their own upstream provider. IOW, they’re just right for what I need, but not right for my larger clients’ needs. Read what they say about themselves; unlike some companies, they don’t make s**t up.
Steve Bates´s last blog post..Dems About To Cave On…
Thanks Steve & Bryan. 🙂 I’ve had a look at NearlyFreeSpeech, and as you say, they look pretty good (as you say) for smaller business’s with basic needs and good for community type sites. 🙂 The lack of SSL support is a problem for this site as it’s an eCommerce / Portal system and will rely on SSL (Nobody wants their financial details spread around in plain ASCII). 🙂 I do understand what they say about static IP’s and agree in principle… But in the *real* World where crooks will take advantage the instant you give them an opening… not so good sadly. So, not good for this project, but I think they will be very useful for other projects (and as you say) for prototyping. 🙂 Thanks for the heads up! 😀
I’m having good luck with Linode.com, deal is you have to know how to manage Linux, but if you do, it really gives you the flexibility to do whatever you want. I’d suggest going with their Centos 5.2 (rebranded Red Hat) or their Debian 4.0 if you’re concerned about long-term support.
And whether they’re suitable depends on the traffic you’re talking about. It may be that you need a dedicated host, which gets you up into a different pricing tier and adds some additional issues to be concerned about.
Badux´s last blog post..How bankruptcy "reform" contributed to the current economic crisis
The sad truth is you are going to have to start looking for hosting reviews to find something people don’t hate. Most reviews tend to be extended kvetching about the last host someone had.
Then you have to determine who is a real host, and who is a reseller, which is often nearly impossible, as you have already found out.
Looking for versions on their software is also tough, and usually means they are a reseller if they don’t mention it.
I wish you luck. I wasted most of two days finding a new host for my older brother because of his weird e-mail requirements.
Thanks Badtux. 🙂 The bandwidth is why we want a flexible (and responsive) provider. Initially, we don’t expect traffic to be very high. However, it is quite possible that could change rapidly. So, a host that has flexible bandwidth allocation as needed with the possibility of using a dedicated box somewhere down the track is ideal. Initially, the site will focus on a small specialist market segment and the client already has a handle on all the likely players, so we have a good idea of usage there. Over time, this will be expanded and diversify more into associated markets and so bandwidth requirements will increase (hopefully!) LOL
My development/test server here runs CentOS 5.2 and XAMPP for Linux v1.7
It has everything I need. I’ve added some apache mod’s such as mod_Security and mod_evasive, and disabled everything I don’t need. 🙂
Oh yeah… I know how it works Bryan. 🙂 Been down this road before, more than once. *sigh*
One i’m looking at is ix Web Hosting
Another that a friend recommended is Shinjiru
I’m looking at Hosting Service Reviews and other review sites. 🙂
Thanks for your help guys, it is appreciated. 🙂
I didn’t want to get too deep into your application, Kryten, not knowing how much you could say, but I suspected e-commerce and that isn’t an area I work with a lot. I don’t currently have any direct experience with a client selling over the ‘Net, and I don’t like to make recommendations outside my personal experience.
The hosts I work with do what they do in a competent manner, but half of them are too high priced, but the clients won’t move. Most of them don’t upgrade their software nearly as often as I would like, and that can lead to security problems.
I definitely wouldn’t recommend the place I found for my brother unless you are looking for spam filtering so tight, half the time I suspect it filters me.
Good luck with it, and try to stay cool. Without an A/C and 40° temps you aren’t going to be running a computer during the day.
You would understand I’m sure that being an ex-spook type, we understand ‘confidentiality’ (especially with NDA’s involved). I also am very aware of IP (as in ‘Intellectual Property’, not ‘Internet Protocol’). My client (as I said once before) is also a long time friend (over 20 years) who has always been there for me, which makes me extra paranoid! 😉 He also worked in very sensitive military areas in the UK and understands all these issues. He’s more worried about my IP than his. It’s kinda nice (but can get annoying also). 🙂 Also, when people I respect, or work for or just generally like tell me things, I tend to assume it’s none of anyone else business unless the person involved tells them directly. I’ve been called such things as ‘bastard’ by certain people because I wouldn’t ‘talk out of school’. Not that I care. LOL I only care about the personal opinions of me of those who actually know me. 🙂
It’s after midnight, and still 30C! Tomorrow (today now I suppose) is expected to reach 46C (about 115F I guess?) in the southern parts of Aus! I don’t care if it’s not good for ‘puters… It’s def NOT good for me!! LOL They said on the news tonight we haven’t experienced a heatwave like this in a hundred years. So it’s not just some ‘seasonal event’! We have a good double-brick, well insulated house and ceiling fans. It’s all we’ve needed until now. Trouble will a well insulated place, once the heat eventually does soak in… it takes ages to dissipate and cool. I’m considering tossing everything out of the freezer and sitting in it tomorrow! LOL
I’ve just been catching up on US news… Saw these at C&L.
This made me *sigh*, really:
GOP Attacks Birth Control Funds in Bill, Obama Knuckles Under
This was quite interesting for a few reasons:
Nixon’s Lawyer: Are We Civilized Enough To Prosecute For Torture?
THis, I’m not sure about. Time will tell if it’s good or not. 😉
AC360: Barack Obama’s Interview With al-Arabiya
Apologies Badtux. I finally got around to checking Linode (I had my PC’s off most of the day because of the heat).
Yeah, I like the idea of virtual hosting and have been looking. 🙂 Linode seems to be the best and most reasonable priced I’ve looked at so far. 🙂
What I’m developing for my client/friend (and myself in fact), is essentially a framework system that can be *simply* (‘simply’ relative to building a new system from scratch) customized or expanded, even completely resigned for other clients or uses. Kind of a RAD system for complex sites. 🙂 So, flexibility (as I said above) in hosting will be important. Having my own control over a virtual host is cheaper than a dedicated box, and the performance hit isn’t an issue at this early stage. 🙂
Thanks Badtux, much appreciated! 😀
Most performance issues can be resolved by reducing the number of graphics and cleaning up the code. Unfortunately, that has to happen on both the server and user side. You can’t force people not to use a bad, standards ignoring, bloated browser, so you work with what you have. It was so much simpler when everyone was using Unix and Lynx.
I don’t remember when everyone was using Unix and Lynx. NCSA Mosaic actually predated Lynx, at least as a HTTP browser (Lynx was originally a Gopher browser). I recall using NCSA Mosaic on the early World Wide Web on Sun Sparcstations (our university had a computer lab full of Suns), and saying to myself, “meh, nice concept, but too slow and doesn’t have as much information on it as the Gophersphere” (the Gophersphere at that time having many university library catalogs on it, which made searching for books for ILL — Inter Library Loan — very easy). Yet another one of those cases where I was wrong about something that turned out really Big (like the time I told my boss, “Linux? That hackerware thing you download off the Internet? Why would we want to bother with that, we have enough trouble maintaining our own software, much less some hackerware downloaded off the Internet!”).
Fancy graphics are, alas, a requirement for many modern applications based around presenting data. Just look at Google Maps. Google itself is very stingy with its bandwidth, with very few (and small) graphics, but there’s no getting around presenting graphical data, well, graphically.
– Badtux the Geeky Penguin
Badux´s last blog post..I! Am! Very! Excited!
I wasn’t into innovations like HTTP when I started. A Teletype 33 ripping along at 10cps on rolls of yellow paper was all you needed. We had ASCII graphics, but they took all day to print. You could kill hours in Cave off-line.
There weren’t very many nodes and the “backbone” was 64K leased lines, so people would complain if you got too carried away, but the original Lynx was a “great leap forward”, and you can still use it if you find the graphics annoying, but the pages look odd to say the least, more like the source code.
You got a 64K leased line? Wow! We were on a 56K leased line until we got a NSF grant for a T1. The 56K leased line was fine for Gopher, but by the time we had the Suns and NCSA Mosaic, we needed that T1 — and Mosaic swiftly chewed it up, divided by the number of Suns we had (several hundred).
What most amused me about those Suns was Sun’s funky window manager, OLWM. That was the biggest piece of trash I had ever seen compared to real window managers such as on the Mac or Amiga.. I discovered that twm was still hidden away somewhere on the system, read the documentation on how to set it up, and promptly hacked my .xsession file to start up twm rather than olwm. twm did no more than olwm and was even uglier, but it at least was small and fast. Then came the day when Sun disowned SunOS and forced-marched everybody to Solaris, and everybody had to use CDE. CDE was even worse than OLWM. By that time Windows 95 was out, and I looked at Windows 95, then looked at CDE, and I was, like, “excuse me? Are these Unix workstation geeks smoking some really nasty hashish or somethin? It’s like they ignored everything we learned from the Mac, Amiga, and Windows!” But of course it was that whole NIH thing. The Mac, Amiga, and Windows were “toy” computers, not “real” computers like Unix workstations. So there was no need to look at what “toys” were doing. Assholes. No wonder Unix lost the desktop wars… crap, they never even fired a shot, they just pretended there was no war in the first place and then one day woke up astounded to find that Windows ruled the world.
Aix on IBMs sucked just a bad. They made no attempt to sell what they had. AT&T had a good box with a real 8086, instead of the 8088, but they didn’t know how to sell it. The same with the TI-Pro, great graphics but no marketing. DEC had good equipment, but they couldn’t understand about standards.
AT&T was really annoying because they had the R&D as well as the facilities to kick everyone else’s butt and they wimped out. Bloody Xerox gave away the whole GUI world, and didn’t anything with what was created at PARC.
My younger brother spent the bulk of his working life in the mini, then micro world, so I got to see some amazing things that never made it to the market. There was software and hardware created that would have rivaled almost anything available today, but the “suits” didn’t get it. They locked themselves into the concept that they sold to other corporations, and just couldn’t conceive of a retail sale. That’s why
DellHP owns DEC and Compaq.DellHP understood customers, while the old line guys spent too much time watching Wall Street Week. [senior moment there]The new Linux versions are fine, and eventually that’s where people will end up, because Microsoft has lost the thread. Vista was a disaster, Microsoft has finally figured that out and is moving to it’s next iteration, but the GOPression we’re in will start draining even their cash reserves.
Apple could make a killing if it delinked its software from its hardware. They certainly have the slickest X GUI interface. I don’t expect them to do it, any more than I expect Microsoft to offer Office on Linux. I would do it in a heartbeat.
I was using Lynx the day after I setup CentOS last week! The crappy ATI vid drivers I d/l messed up and I could only boot in mode 1 (Init 1) or 3 (with networking). I had to kludge together working drivers from the ATI source and an open source version, after reading lot’s of sites in Lynx. Was kinda fun actually. 😉 LOL
In the early 90’s, I was maintaining the Melb POP for an ISP that started in ’88 with Telnet and UUCP access. We started with a pair of 64k leased lines, and gradually increased to 8. When there wasn’t much traffic, I used to enjoy the speed from my HP workstation. I actually became a Mosaic and NCSA developer, and then moved on to Netscape. I had a lot more fun in those days.
I had a KSR33 hooked up to a PDP 11/03, then an 11/78, and eventually a VAX 11/750 from ’78 to ’81. In ’79 I was given a Beehive CRT terminal (I forget the model now). I also used a Northstar Horizon. I loved that system! LOL Ran a CP/M variant (North Star DOS I think) and had 2 big Shugart FDD’s. The PSU was huge and heavy I remember. Hmmm… S100 bus too. I developed a couple cards for it. 🙂 We ended up with a Pr1me 250 Mini in ’80, and I had fun learning PrimeOS. The guy who developed their OS (Bill something or other) and other software left to start Apollo. I really enjoyed playing with a network of Apollo Workstations in the late 80’s (3000 and 4000 series, and eventually, a prototype 10000 monster server!) And of course, the DomainOS and Aegis OS’s they had. Sadly, they were taken over and destroyed by HP (As HP does with all their acquisitions. I also worked on Tandem Nonstop mainframes which HP inherited via DEC).
I became a SunOS Sys Admin. When we were forced to go Solaris, we decided to go with HP and I gained HP-UX accreditation (v6 I think). None of them were as good as Apollo’s Aegis or DomainOS IMHO. Anyway, we discovered that moving to HP wasn’t such a great idea after all. Oh well… 🙂
Ahhh yes… those good ol’ days! *sigh* 😉
It’s stinking hot (34C in my room here according to mo temp monitor here). I just turned on the PC to check email and do a bit of snooping. Having a high-end PC and a big 21″ Trinitron CRT in Summer sux! They generate a lot of heat. Winter is good though. 😉
BTW… My company began selling Facom (Fujitsu) systems (which were essentially IBM Mainframe & Mini clones only much more robust. fault-tolerant, and had better support. 🙂
They created a JV company with Panasonic called Panafacom and made PC’s. They released a dual-CPU 8086 based system that was awesome! But, they refused to license DOS and only used CP/M-86, and then DRI/ICL/Panafacom created MP/M for it and some ICL PC’s.
My company was actually blacklisted by IBM. We had converted some major IBM sites to Facom. 🙂 Heh… I loved it! 😀
Then, for certain reasons, I enlisted and ‘went off to war’. When I returned, and my sanity returned, my company was dead and I was offered a job in Spooksville.
I’ve made several mistakes… They seemed like a good idea at the time. 😉
Yeah, PARC! *sigh* I visited the Palo Alto Research Center’ and I was given a copy of ParcPlace Smalltalk. I thought it was a great language! I couldn’t get them to do anything with it! It was relegated to a few *specialist* developers and that was it. Stupid.
I haven’t thought about Tandem in years. One of my clients in SoCal [banking related] used them. It was overkill for what they did, but it impressed their clients, so it served its purpose.
S-100 was just too logical when faced with the creative chaos of the IBM PC. I have never understood why the bad ideas all become the standards, and why none of the real pioneers never seem to profit from their inventions and concepts. “Build a better mousetrap” and either the concept will be stolen by a major corporation, or the rights will be bought for a pittance and the design will never go to market.
You could nearly heat a house with a 21-inch crt which is a good idea at 34° C. We, OTOH, didn’t hit 35° the whole of last summer, which was weird.
I well remember a few things that “seemed like a good idea at the time”, but you can’t change them, so you move on.
Mix up some cookie dough and drop it on top of the system unit before you power up. At least you get something for the heat.
LOL I thought of tossing a couple eggs and some bacon in a frypan and stick it on the system box. The CPU temp meter is registering 62C right now. Actually, we just had a very nice (and sane) cold salmon salad. Was good. 🙂 We have LOT’s of ice in the freezer, and lot’s of bottled water in the fridge. I think I’ve drunk about 4l so far. 🙂
Just finished watching the local news. The weather report was crazy! They said that the reported temp (43-46C) were in the shade. They took a temp monitor into the sun and left it a few minutes. It was reading 52.3C! The now say that this is the first time ever we have had more than 2 days in a row over 40C, and the last time we had 2 days was 1875 (from memory).
There is a story about Tandem very few people know. 🙂 About their very rapid rise, and their very sudden fall. 😉 It’s… very interesting. I could give a hint maybe… There was a SciFi movie called ‘Colossus: The Forbin Project’ If you watch that, and you know some of the principles behind the tandem philosophy and design… you might get the idea. The Tech adviser for that movie was the genius that designed the original Tandem OS (which is a name that is never, ever to be uttered!) called ‘Guardian’. Curiously, this was the name of one of the supercomputers in the movie. 😉 It was soon discovered that the fellow was a little… troubled and a tad paranoid. 🙂
It was kinda freaky in the 80’s doing a demo on a Nonstop II and later the Cyclone. 🙂 A common demo was to have a system doing some big DB transactions and streaming data (usually a very long list of some sort) on a multi-CPU system. Each CPU and memory card had a row of LED’s at the edge like a bar graph to show the current capacity (usage) of that card. Whoever was running the demo would have a client or prospect type some kind of transaction command into a terminal which would stream data from a large DB, then the guy would open one of those black glass cabinets Tandem used, and grab the first CPU card running at max (all LED’s lit) and pull it out! The display would slow for a second and then pick up and you would see the LED’s on the other cards pick up o the slack. Then he might pull another CPU or a RAM card just to show off! LOL Everything in a Nonstop had at least two data path’s and multiple redundancy. It was beautiful from an Engineers perspective. 🙂
One day… I may just write that book! 😉 LOL
The systems were definitely virtually unstoppable. Of course, it is a lot cheaper to do a lot of those things today, and anyone running any major production shop would be a fool not to incorporate the basics, like RAID systems, into their set-ups, but it is unlikely that people will ever really accomplish the totality of a Tandem again. Frankly, there is no need to do it.
OTOH, there have been a number of times when I would have killed to have that ability, having lost days worth of calculations because of a failure at a bad time.
As for “troubled and a tad paranoid”. you would pretty much have to be to have gone to the trouble of creating the Tandem. Would any sane person assume all of the possible scenarios that a Tandem could survive? He had the computer equivalent of wearing a belt and braces with a flight suit.
If you have so much ice you could just dump it in a bowl and have a fan blow over it. I did that in California for Santa Ana winds, but it wasn’t a big flat.
The Fujitsu mainframes were actually Gene Amdahl’s, he sold out his share of the company to Fujitsu after IBM FUD’ed his company nigh unto death, there were tons of lawsuits regarding access to IBM’s OS’es and such. Amdahl was of course one of the original architects of IBM’s mainframe line, it’s no surprise that he could take that architecture and make it cry and sing far better than IBM’s corporate culture of the early 70’s could manage (a corporate culture most exemplified by the drawing of dinosaurs stuck in a tar pit on the front page of _The Mythical Man Month_).
The biggest issue with S-100 was the form factor, closely followed by the heat released by the then-extant linear regulators (there were no small-form-factor switching regulators at the time and remember, S-100 sent AC over the bus, any regulation down to DC was required to be done on the board). I actually used a Zenith Z-100 for a time in the early 80’s that was based around the S-100 bus but in an all-in-one case similar to the TRS-80 Model III, the dadburned thing was enormous compared to the IBM PC. Because it was based on an S-100 you could toss a Z-80 CPU card into the beast and run CP/M as well as PC-DOS. Not that we did so. Frankly, mostly we just ran Kermit on the damned things to talk to our mainframes.
Regarding Apple de-coupling hardware and software, one of the things they sell is that their stuff just works. There’s no fiddling with device drivers and crap like that when you’re trying to install it on a piece of hardware, it just works. There’s folks who’ve done “Hackintoshes”, added drivers to the installer disk and distribution to install it on non-Apple hardware, and you can make it work but it’s as frustrating as using Windows because nothing works *perfectly*, the way it works on Apple’s own hardware. For example, if you close the laptop lid, it may or may not go to sleep, whereas an Apple laptop *always* goes to sleep when you close the lid, and *always* wakes up when you open the lid. Installed on any arbitrary hardware, it gets as arbitrary as with Linux and Windows — on both, I’ve had trouble with things coming back up after I’ve done a sleep-wakeup cycle, on both probably 30% of the time some random driver has some random bug and decides not to wake up some random piece of hardware correctly and you end up having to reboot anyhow. Besides, selling hardware and OS together is just so *profitable* for Apple. I mean, they’re selling a $400 laptop for $995 just by slapping the Apple name and installing OS/X on it. That kind of gross margin just can’t be had by selling software alone…
Yep. 🙂 Fujitsu gave Amdahl a nice deal. He continued to help Fujitsu for awhile. I remember one very large client that was running IBM Mainframes who went to tender for the typical 5 year deal. IBM essentially just submitted their standard proposal with the appropriate blanks filled in, in the usual 3 volume blue IBM binders with appendices. 🙂 IBM had the innate belief back then that they didn’t have to do any work, especially on an existing client, and they had no competition. 🙂 They got a big shock! LOL Fujitsu chartered a plane and shipped a complete M-150 system with a bunch of engineers and programmers and a project manager. They set up a demo two weeks after landing for the client. This was already impressive as IBM would take 6 months to install a system, let alone get it running fully. 🙂 One of the problems this client had was that they had run out of capacity, and they had comm’s problems after adding a few more terminals to their IBM system. IBM’s solution was they would have to install a Series 1 mini as a terminal server. An expensive solution to drive a half dozen extra terminals. Fujitsu ran their client demo with 8 more terminal than the client needed at the time, all over fiber-optic cables. The terminal response was much faster than the IBM’s (using 20mA loop serial lines at the time). Facom said that the high capacity the client needed would be handled my their biggest M-180 mainframe, but suggested they use 2 x M-160’s (for the same price as 1 M-180) which would give them redundancy and more capacity than a single M-180. They also said they would guarantee to convert all their existing systems to the more efficient code on the Fujitsu within 6 months. The deal sweetener (apart from a cheaper price and much lower cost-of-ownership over 5 years compared to IBM) was they said the client could have the M-160 that was there the next day and the tech’s would start work converting and configuring everything immediately. They won the tender, and IBM ranted and raved and blacklisted my company (IBM clients and employees were forbidden to talk to us). We converted 4 more major IBM sites to Fujitsu over the next 2 years. We didn’t care. LOL The last Fujitsu mainframe I saw was an M-780 beast. I loved those Fujitsu systems in the 80’s. They just worked. 🙂 I went to the launch of the M-170F in October ’80 in Japan. Fujitsu sold 1,000 M-170F’s by Feb ’81 globally. Amazing really. 🙂 In 1990, Fujitsu announced UXP/M, the first Sys V compliant UNIX OS for a Mainframe.
Yeah… I still remember the big square heat-sink with the round regulator can sitting on it, and all the electrolytic cap’s taking up too much space on S-100 boards. Still… *shrug*