Re: Free OS/400

["Simon Coulter" <shc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Œ
Hello Phil,

You wrote:
>I know very little about Mac's although the first computer I ever touched
>was an apple IIe.  But the new Max OS X (I think that's what it's called)
>that is a version of unix has caught my attention.  Does anyone know if
>that's going to offer any alternatives to Windows?

The Mac has ALWAYS offered an alternative to Windoze.  Almost every Windoze 
application has a Mac counterpart, frequently made by the same software 
vendor.  For example, Adobe products are available on both Win and Mac, MS 
Offic is avaliable on Win and Mac.  Interestingly, the Mac version is 
SIGNIFICANTLY better than the Win version.  It is written by a compeletely 
separate group in MS and actually works as Office should work -- stable, 
reliable, an generally nicer.

5250 emulators have been, and still are, available for Mac systems, they 
run TCP and can connect to AS/400 with ease.  Diner's Club used Mac's to 
connect to their System/38's nearly 15 BLOODY YEARS AGO!!!!!

OS X is basically Unix derived from the work done at Next when Steve Job's 
was booted out of Apple after John Scully took over.  It looks very sharp 
and seems to work well from my limited investigation (and you can get at 
the raw Unix command line should you need to).  And it has application 
support.

The main reason we haven't used Mac's in the past is twofold:
        1/ Pre OS X Mac's do not have pre-emptive multi-tasking (and I make 
a lot of use of that under OS/2).
        2/ I prefer the Work Place Shell interface that Warp 4 uses.  It is 
simply the best UI around.

However, we needed to by a publishing package recently and we settled on 
Adobe products.  They don't run under OS/2 so we bought a Mac (a new iBook 
-- the white one with combo drive) because I'm not spending any money with 
MS.

If enough AS/400 customers use Mac's then things like OpsNav will be ported 
(If they had used Java instead of C++ then we could run it on OUR client of 
choice rather than suffer Rochester's current love-affair with all thing 
Windoze!  And don't tell me Java wasn't an option -- OpsNav was being 
started about the same time that the SanFrancisco project converted from 
C++ to Java.  Just another example of the short-sightedness of the PC 
people in Rochester.)

Regards,
Simon Coulter.

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