[Beowulf] Win64 Clusters!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Peter St. John]

On 4/2/07, Miller Ross <ross.miller at safetynetsolutions.com> wrote:
>
>
> That said, we as an industry do owe Microsoft one significant debt.
> The standardization of Microcomputer hardware.  Up until DOS the
> world was so fragmented ...


Ross,
We owe that debt to IBM, which decided on Open Architecture for their PC.
(And making up, some, for the EBCDIC fiasco). The big winner in the deal was
Microsoft, who got to keep rights to the OS they brought in; which would be
like McDonald's outsourcing the french-fries and cokes (no matter how
efficiently you make a hamburger, it can't have the huge profit margin of
the 99-cent items).
The payoff for IBM came later, difusely, and gradually; e.g., putting a
zillion instances of linux on a 390 with VMWare, which would never have been
possible without open architecture (and open softare).

One might wonder what would have happened if instead IBM had called Fred
Brooks, the curmudgeonly manger of OS360 who went to UNC: "Hey Fred, It's
Big Blue here. Here's an assembler from Intel for their 8088 chip and a
truckload of prototype microcomputers. Could you get a couple grad students
together and write us an OS, by September? here's a check for a million
dollars".  Of course we'd be nowhere, because IBM would have fallen down
marketing their OS as they did marketing their PC, they just weren't ready
for dealing with the mass consumer market.

MS contributed marketing. That's it. That's enough.

Peter
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