<VV> Future of the Corvair - LONG!!

[Bill H.]

                                                        B"H

Bill:  Nicely said.  It's interesting, but most people that I meet at work, or in the mall parking lot, seem to remember the Corvair.  One younger, hippie type of guy remarked, "I guess Ralph isn't your best friend!"

I always say that I'm surprised that Corvairs don't seem to have the value of say, a contemporary Nova or Chevelle.  I guess it's the unconventional engineering, as well as the difficulty of stuffing a 396 or 454 in the engine room, that keeps values down.

Speaking of computers, I still work in the area of mainframe computers.  These dinosaurs are very alive and well, and get more and more powerful each year.  IBM announced its "T-Rex" Z-series mainframes a couple of years ago, with capabilites of hundreds of millions of instructions processing power per second.  Such systems run hundreds and hundreds of data and power-hungry applications, with thousands and thousands of end users.  Try to do THAT with a Windows server, or even a cluster of Windows servers!  The latest Z-10 series of IBM mainframes pack even more power into a relatively small footprint.

Mainframes still handle millions of accounts in banks, and keep governments running.  As manager of a large-scale IBM mainframe network, it's now my job to pull out all the old IBM proprietary networking hardware and replace it with Ethernet, TCP/IP routers and switches, which will increase processing speed to mainframe end users manifold...Bill Hershkowitz