ba...@mxg.com (Barry Merrill) writes: > Listening to a past NCIS, we think it may have been Season 9 Episode 13: > > "How did you get that voice message he had deleted from his Cell Phone?" > > "I used the service provider's MAINFRAME".
except possibly non-mainframe backend server. 2nd part of the 90s, with the rise of the internet ... the financial industry was increasingly afraid that the telco industry would take-over the payment industry (payment fees represented 40-60% bottom line for US institutions). The issue was that the prospect of micropayments were projected to increase the transaction volume where it would totally swamp the industry mainframe backends ... and the only operations with scale that could possibly handle such volumes were the telco industry non-mainframe backends (developed for handling cellphone callrecord volumes). Fortunately for the industry, the internet micropayments never took off ... and they started putting legislative barriers in place. Note that the rhetoric on the floor of congress was that the primary purpose of GLBA (financial modernization act) was to keep new competition out of banking (in part by restricting new banking charters; congressional rhetoric specifically named a number of other institutions including walmart and microsoft). GLBA is now better known for also repealing Glass-Steagall ... which played a role in the economic mess of the last decade. -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
