In the words of Gomer Pile, "well, golllllllll-eeee! that's exactly what I did on my first 'job' some 20 years ago..."

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Shahan, Ray [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> [...] The virtualization of the hardware will
> also be a situation where many companies "share" the same 
> hardware (CPU), and each uses the hardware at an opportune time.
[...]
> company A and company B both get the three hours from a dedicated CPU
> without any impact to each other, and neither had to pay the 
> full price for the CPU.

At my first [computer] job, we were a "timesharing service" [ring any bells, anyone?] we had a series-III and a series-48 in "the computer center", and all of our "customers" were on "high-speed" dialup [>ahem< 9600 baud as I recall, though some had 19.2k or better -- in any case, ALL of them were "multiplexed"]  Even though all of our customers were "local", they pretty much did their processing on different schedules and rarely "stepped on" each other.

Generally, each customer would have 8-12 "terminals" [later, "XT-class" PC's w/reflection] and 1 or 2 printers, all "stat-muxed" on a 9600 or 19.2k "leased line".  The half a dozen or so clerks would enter accounting data, produce local reports, and print checks as needed.  For larger print runs [i.e., "month-end" posting] the reports would be printed in our computer center and sent via courier.  With greeen-screens & serial printers, nobody noticed or cared that they were working on a "slow" line.

End result: no single customer had to "shell out" for an entire series 48, yet all of them had the advantage of a central^h^h^h^h^h^h^hvirtualized server long before the notion of "local area networks" and "do everything in excel w/shared spreadsheets" even existed. :)

funny how life tends to come full circle...

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