And in Asia, where there is less of a legacy of mainframe systems to be superseded, client-server business systems are the only way to go".
But whether they will dethrone big base-stations, as the PC dethroned minicomputers and mainframes, remains to be seen.
But as Ling Zhijun, a respected Chinese journalist, chronicles in this exhaustive new account, Mr Liu and his colleagues most of whom started in business in their 40s had no experience of running a private company, no idea about modern computers (the first mainframes had to be cooled with ice cubes and a fan) and a formal education that had been cut short by the Cultural Revolution.
I.B.M., which as recently as May said that the mainframe market appeared to be rebounding, declined to comment yesterday.
In particular, the legendary mainframe business was perceived to be in terminal decline, while the firm's hardware (personal computers and the like) were rapidly becoming commodities.
Like the mainframe, which was said to be dead decades ago but has remained a meaningful business, the PC will almost certainly cheat death.
But as currently designed, bipolar transistors -- originally used in mainframe computers -- tend to be expensive and consume a lot of power, said Ghavam Shahidi, director of silicon science at I.B.M. Research.
It sells a program that allows computing tasks that usually run on a mainframe's regular processors to be shifted to the discounted ones meant to run things like Linux.
Let's not forget that IBM was once the king of mainframes, which was a great place to be until mainframes were marginalized by mini computers from the likes of DEC, Wang and Data General (who in turn were rather quickly disrupted by the PC and LANs).
I.B.M.'s mainframe sales, however, are projected to be $3.3 billion in 2010 and represent about three-quarters of the overall mainframe market of $4.5 billion.
Not long ago dismissed as a stoic Rin Tin Tin in the flashier Scooby Doo era of Pentium and RISC {reduced instruction set computing} technology, the mainframe computer is proving itself to be a worthy Web server.
