The academic computer-science community has been hostile to IBM for a very long time. Some of this hostility was provoked, understandably, by long ago IBM hubris; but it remains pervasive in a period when most of that hubris has been dissipated.
Things may change, but at the moment there is no great university demand for mainframes for instructional use. There is instead active hostility to them on many campuses, and this is problematic. I routinely encounter computer-science majors who know nothing of mainframes and a good number of whom 'think' they are no longer being made. Moreover, this problem feeds upon itself. Timothy Sipples is right to emphasize that mainframes figure in, for example, many crucial banking applications; but these students do not perceive such applications to be 'interesting'; and they are right: few of them are of any technical (as opposed to economic) interest. We are in a situation much like that of the atomic-energy industry some years ago. The original Hanford, Washington, gaseous-diffusion facility for the separation of uranium isotopes was designed by Enrico Fermi, slide rule in hand. It then came uinder the control of AEC civil servants; and when decades later it was shut down, after polluting large tracts of the state of Washington all but irretrievably, there was no professional physicist on its staff. I hope not, but I fear that we are at an impasse, in the literal French sense of a dead end. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
