I was on the UQ Computing Consultancy Committe when IBM made a big fuss about 'making the UQ the Computing Hub of the South Pacific' - and offered massive discounts.
Only 2 people were suspicious: the Head of The Computer Science Dept, and me...
They did the same trick to the WA Uni... later heard they sued IBM - seems that IBM had a bunch of new crap amd wanted to shift the old crap.... :-)
When the big boxes arrive some fun occurred...
Well you see, one of the big selling points was the 'VM'... :-)
Was in the computer lab one quiet day, when one student in Prof Nyssen's mad mob, started running his assignment - a mini hospital DB thing - :-) - the sysop was horrified to see on student take 27% of the system - as he watched, teh 2nd student logged in, another 27% - by the time he got the Dept Comp Sci head on the phone, the 3rd had started.... by the time they started down the corrifor, the 4th had joined.... 4 x 27 >> 100% ... :-)
Also they wanted to run UNIX as a VM ... the trial showed that this humungous bloody big box would let 8 users run before 100% utilisation.... :-)
Well, you see, the intelligent disk controllers said "hey, this guy wants a byte from here, I'll just help him by queuing the whole track, just in case he needs it... but UNIX with its i-node file structure is not really compatible with that.... :-P
Well, it seems that the Sysops had not had the time to read the manuals closely...
You see with VM, each VM OS thinks that it has the whole machine, but the supervisor OS allocates REAL memory to the slave OSes on the basis of its VIRTUAL memory. Now the slave OSes think they are on a real machine, so they have 'real' & 'virtual' memory too.. and they swap THEIR virtual memory out.... but Big Daddy also helpfully tries to swap out various chunks of what it sees as 'virtual' memory, but the slaves think is 'real memory'.... :-)
The sysops missed the fine print about locking the 'virtual real' memory in 'real real' memory... :-)