I don’t need all the junk that comes with full bore Outlook.
Outlook Express is fairly clean and doesn’t use alot of resources.
I wouldn’t let any MS product within ten logical miles of the 2086. 8 gig core memory, a terrabyte on SAN, 4 1000 megabyte ethernet ports... z/OS 1.6
That machine is rock solid.
I can get a server from Dell more powerful than this for a few thousand dollars.
The PCs have far outstripped the mainframes in just about every measure EXCEPT for the OS reliability. However, the modern OSs such as Vista or XP are actually pretty stable (I run 8 PCs on XP and never crash). There is also Linux.
I spent 10 years on MVS but the truth of the matter is that mainframes are in a death cycle.
8 gb RAM ~ $600 (or less if not 2GB cards)
4 gigabit network cards ~ $50 (depends on card and features)
1 TB disk ~ $250 (more or less depending upon how many drives)
For a couple of thouand dollars I can equip a PC to be more powerful. This isn’t even taking into account the cheap, cheap cost of consumer devices such as PS3s.
The largest computing done today is on clusters of PCs. The datacenters for Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc. dwarf mainframe sites.
Go buy a new PC rather than using old hardware. On Dell Outlet you can purchase a very nice system for $700 or so (Intel Dual Core, 1 GB RAM, 320MD disk, 1 gbit network). Cheap price for a lot less aggravation.