> Were personal computers replacing mainframes nuts? Personal computers never replaced mainframes. Personal computers replaced minicomputers and workstations.

> Were personal computers replacing mainframes nuts? Personal computers never replaced mainframes. Personal computers replaced minicomputers and workstations. The difference is meaningful, even in this context: Minicomputers and workstations were high-end systems dedicated to things like relatively small-scale file storage, graphics processing, network tasks (servers, routers), and other workloads which required neither high throughput nor long up-times. They mainly required more RAM, CPU, and, sometimes, specialized hardware than it was feasible to put on a home system of the era. Mainframes, on the other hand, had become specialized as high-throughput high-availability systems, running large databases and supporting dozens to hundreds of users at a time, for years on end. They'd grown entire specialized architectures dedicated to handling that kind of workload, and were only getting moreso as time went on. My point is, if Theranos is the PC, it's only going to replace some aspects of the market it's moving into, and, from this article, it might not even do that. It's just too difficult to play catch-up with the extremely specialized realms, even if you have technology which is an 80% solution for 90% of the problems.