> i too am both curious as to the motivations for VM and completely open > minded with no preconceived notions about VM. except my aversion to > hype. but hype is independent from the quality of an idea.
I understood that IBM's motive for VM was to allow different OSes to co-exist on a single hardware platform. That the same OS also managed to co-exist with multiple instances of itself was an added bonus and greatly simplified the multitasking process. Basically, there were radical incompatibilies between successive OS releases from IBM (you may recall those days as being a quick succession of software discoveries/inventions, unmatched by recent developments) and IBM could not compel users to rewrite their applications, no matter how exciting the new platform. In fact, I suspect IBM themselves made good use of the backwards compatibility they provided with VM. By providing VM capabilities _at_the_hardware_level_ IBM could entice customers to upgrade and thus appreciate the improvements in the newer equipment. The enormous investment of man power as well as intellectual effort involved in producing custom applications made this critical. We live in a different world, today, with disposable equipment on every desk. But there is a price tag and it's not just higher electricity bills. For example, disk warranties. Ten years ago you could buy a 2 Gig drive with a lifetime guarantee (rough guess, I can't recall very accurately that far back), now you _expect_ you 320 Gig drive to pack up on you within two years. What happens to the 320 Gig of data you entrusted to the drive, then? I would much rather have a single, reliable computer with the essential instruction set (I'm not exclusively sold on RISC, but I do think it makes a lot more sense) and replaceable peripherals than invest in the latest, greatest Wintel box with the fanciest, most irrelevant multimedia instruction set in the dual-core CPU and a Winmodem for my Internet connectivity :-( But ranting isn't going to help. ++L
