owning the hardware was Re: Interested in UNIVAC 9000 Series (and IBM 360)

[Cameron Kaiser]

> > Old Computerworlds from the time had a lot of ads for timesharing
> > services.
> 
> That was before everyone decided it was far cheaper and saner to own
> and administer their own systems.
> (ahem.)

I will say on the personal side, as someone who has run their
own do-everything server continuously since 1998 (and I'm sure I'm hardly
the longest running person on this list), it's without a doubt cheaper to
just buy a VM slice nowadays. In fact, my backup mail exchanger is a
FreeBSD slice on the lowest tier since all it has to do exchange mail when
the main machine goes down.

Currently, my monthly bill is $400 for the T1 (it's what I could get out
here that was server-grade) and somewhere around $150-$200 for power, plus
my time when the crap hits the fan and parts need to be ordered and installed.
Then there's the amortized cost of the $10,000 POWER6 I've used since 2010,
though I freely admit that purchase was overkill (the Apple Network Server
it replaced was also around $10,000 but I got that for "work for us over the
summer and we'll throw in the equipment you're already using"; the POWER6 was
convenient since it runs all of the ANS' AIX binaries without comment).

The VM slice costs $20.

-- 
------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
  Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
-- 1-GHz Pentium-III + Java + XSLT == 1-MHz 6502. -- Craig Bruce --------------