RE: Computer Hardware is a Commodity -- MIDRANGE-L

I'm going to weigh in with the opposing viewpoint (now THERE'S a surprise,
eh?<grin>).  The AS/400 (and perhaps the entire continuum of the IBM
midrange platform) is an absolutely unique development environment.  Unlike
any other machine that I've worked on, the AS/400 has allowed users to
upgrade to newer and better hardware and software while still running their
legacy applications.  The fact that I can save a library off of an old CISC
box, install it on a brand new RISC machine ten OS levels up, and run the
applications - without so much as recompiling them - is absolutely
unparalleled in the industry.

Try moving a UNIX program from one box to another.  Try moving it from one
version of the operating system to another - that will almost never work.
Heck, try moving it from one machine to another with the SAME version of the
operating system, and the chances are it won't work.  Why is the MAKE
utility so important in UNIX land?  Because you have to use it whenever you
install a product!

Now, in this day and age, the RPM utility that comes with Linux goes a long
way toward allowing at least some cross-machine compatibility, but it's
nothing like the AS/400.

In the last five years or so, we've gone from a pure OPM, RPG-only (okay,
COBOL too) environment to a fully Java-enabled, ILE capable, SQL-accessible
machine - and yet the programs we wrote ten years ago STILL RUN.

While I agree that the applications help make the machine, without this
particular machine, there would be none of the applications.  The IBM
midrange platform has been the premier platform for business systems
development, and if it doesn't continue to be, it's because we haven't
learned yet how to take advantage of its unique capabilities in this brave
new development world.

Joe


> Bob, I completely agree with this.  On this list we've gone round
> and round
> the fundamental question "What is an AS/400?", trying to get IBM to market
> "the AS/400," to save "the AS/400."  But I don't think we've been able to
> say exactly what the 400 is.  Is it the reliable hardware?  Other
> computers
> (Tandem?) have better uptime.  Is it the stable OS?  Other OSes
> (System V?)
> have similar stability records.  Is it DDS instead of SQL?  Is it GUI vs
> Green Screen?
>
> The bottom line is that AS/400 is _the application software that the
> customer runs on it_    I believe that if I wrote a Windows NT clone of
> OS/400 and people could run their current application suite on cheap PC
> hardware, they would abandon AS/400 hardware in droves, uptime or not.

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