[rescue] Friends & Family processing...

[Ken Hansen]

Everything you say sounds right - MCI wasn't really a force in the Long
Distance market until the early 90's, and I guess you were right about the
486 coming out later than I remembered too.

Thanks,

Ken
----- Original Message -----
From: "Patrick Giagnocavo" <patrick at zill.net>
To: <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Sent: Friday, August 03, 2001 11:28 PM
Subject: Re: [rescue] Mac Appliance


> On Fri, Aug 03, 2001 at 10:22:06PM -0400, Ken Hansen wrote:
> > Funny story - Remember MCI Friends & Families program, reduced rates for
> > calling certain numbers (your friends and families)? Well, when that
program
> > rolled out, it was managed on a 486 Comaq desktop computer...
> >
> > I can only assume that machine was running windows (mid 80's)...
>
> Umm 486 came out later than the mid-80's ...
>
> > The "trick" to making this work on such a low-end machine, is that the
> > processing is done "off-line", after the call completes but *before* the
> > bill is cut...
>
> I heard it ran on Nextstep/486 boxes.  When I worked for a small Nextstep
> software reseller, MCI was one of the biggest customers (aside from
> three-letter-agency folks, who we always assumed were buying for the NSA).
>
> The key was multithreading, and the object-relational mapping with the
> database driver kit that Next included with NS.  Think "ODBC done right"
> (and before Microsoft came out with ODBC).
>
> So the data searches were done on big Oracle or Sybase boxes, and each
agent
> had a NS system in front of him/her.
>
> ./patrick
>
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