re: #59 O say, does that Star Spangled Banner yet wave..

By the time I made it into the corporate arena, very few outside of banks still had mainframes that actually handled workloads; they might still have their mainframe computer itself, mainly because it was built into the building.

It’s been decades since the mainframe were very large once IBM converted over to CMOS CPU’s; by that time they were refrigerator-sized, but dwarfed by the sheer number of hard discs (DASD raches). Now with 1U flash drives and high-density terabyte disc arrays mainframes can handle any size workload you can throw on it; especially with z/TPF (Transaction Processing Facility) being able to bust out hundreds of thousands of transactions/sec for airlines, hotels and car reservation systems.

I cut my teeth into the Unix world via Minix written by Prof. Andrew Tanenbaum for his ‘Principles of Operating Systems’ book on my Atari 520ST which I upgraded by stacking 512KB DRAM’s on top of the motherboard and using wire-wrap soldered to the address selection line.