Abstract
This paper describes the UK CSO's main computing activities over the past eight years or so. Over that time, the Office has converted the statistical computing systems written in Cobol and Fortran and running on proprietary mainframes, to use Relational Database software running on Open System (Unix) computers.
The paper briefly reviews the benefits of adopting this architecture and offers recommendations to others following a similar path, drawn from the accumulated experience. In particular, it discusses the difficulty of assessing the size of Unix system needed and stresses the importance of carrying out realistic benchmarks on the intended hardware/software combination.
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