In the early 1980's I worked at the University of Toronto Computing Service, a typical university mainframe shop. My boss at one point was Terry J. Wood, a very forward-looking individual and a great mentor to me at the time. We were very aware of the potential impact of micro-computers, having built a student access system upon the DEC LSI-11/23. One of the issues of the day was IBM's per-CPU licensing for systems and applications, so one of our favorite questions to ask visiting academics was something like: "So what will per-cpu licensing really mean, when you can emulate an entire System/370 in a hand-held computer?"
When I got Hercules, a free, open-source System/370 emulator and freely-downloadable VM/370 and OS/370/370 going on my Mac notebook, I knew that our prophecy had, like those of MacBeth's witches, come true to the max.

My onJava.com article tries to get people interested in some of the new things happening in Java-land