[rescue] Re: [geeks] THIS. MAKES. ME. SICK.

[Brian Harrington]

On Wed, 13 Jun 2001, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:

> Aren't the zSeries machines even more tightly controlled that the Crays?
> I heard one place (old Byte maybe) that you can't buy an IBM mainframe,
> you can only rent them.  I've also heard that every IBM mainframe
> installed has a dedicated phone line connected back to the nearest IBM
> center.

Nope, the only leasing thing went out a long time ago (60s?) during one of
IBM's tangles with the antitrust folks.  Today, they will happily sell you
one, and there's a thriving used market.  There are also a bunch of
third-party maintenance outfits that will take care of your stuff for less
than Big Blue.  I almost got a 9221 once, but didn't have room/power for
the disk drives.  Now that Hercules is out there to fool around with, I'll
probably stick with it though, unless a P370/P390 falls in my lap.

I think the phone home thing was someone else, Convex maybe?  The joke was
that you wouldn't know anything was wrong with the machine until the spare
showed up in the mail.  Big IBM installs have onsite SEs, and they do the
phoning home. :-)

                      -- Brian


--
Brian Harrington
Milton S. Eisenhower Library
The Johns Hopkins University
brian at sigh.mse.jhu.edu