On Jan 5, 2008, at 7:53 PM, Clark F Morris wrote:
The following on comp.lang.cobol should give us some food for thought
although the mainframe is now being used as a web server.
Clark Morris
On Sat, 05 Jan 2008 11:22:26 -0600, in comp.lang.cobol Scott
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Howard Brazee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]:
It's about allowing a student to connect his laptop computer to the
Web, log on, and sign up for a class. It's about allowing a
salesman
to connect his laptop computer to the Web, enter his sales and
pull up
some graphs.
The functionality is more than just the pretty face.
It is about a pretty face WITH functionality and you cannot have
a pretty face on the mainframe. Companies always want the pretty
screens
and the mainframe loses because of it, in spite of its clear
advantage in
almost every other area.
I'm sorry to say but as a Systems Analyst, over and over again, users
and management are always more interested in how an application LOOKS
than in how it WORKS. Of course if it doesn't work right there is
a big
problem. But the point is, in every phase of an application life
cycle,
to the people outside of I.T. who hold the purse strings, LOOKING
good
is always their first priority. And to THEM, looking good MEANS
functionality. That's what screws the mainframe.
It may have cost IBM a pretty penny years ago to make graphic screens
but what is it costing them now? Short-sighted corporate mentality
loses the business again.
Clark:
The person has a point but it is somewhat incorrect. He is looking at
the past with eyes of the present. Everybody (almost) has 20/20
hindsight.
One could say the same thing about early aviators, they went with
current technology and it evolved to jet engines. "Today" we have
star trek warp drive somewhere in the future. To speak to somebody a
100 years ago about faster than light speed you would get a blank
look. Nobody had a clue that the speed of light was 186,000 Miles per
sec (sorry don't know the Kilometer value is off the top of my head).
But the point is you go where current technology is and then evolve.
Yes the PC was just evolutionary not really revolutionary (IMO). Will
the people 100 years from know be saying the same thing about the PC,
probably. But that is how things work. You will probably never get to
an end point (unless the universe collapses then who cares).
Ed
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