RE: NY Times Reports "Little Blue "- IBM to Offer Smaller Versio nOfIts Mainframe Computer

> From: Douglas Handy
> 
> Where do people get the idea that the iSeries system is so obsolete?

Primarily from people who don't understand how computers work.

Heck, when I consider the incredible sophistication of making a Unicode JVM
with an ASCII interface work in an EBCDIC machine, and more importantly how
it is made nearly completely transparent to the programmer, I'm amazed.

The CISC-to-RISC move was an order of magnitude above anything Windows has
ever attempted, much less succeeded at (witness "driver hell").

The constant re-invention of the RPG language while maintaining backward
compatibility has saved companies untold millions (billions?) of dollars in
development costs, whereas the move from VB to VB.NET will cost companies a
ton of money to add zero functionality.

Slipping the IFS "under" the QSYS.LIB system was absolutely brilliant.

Now, none of these things has been perfect (although you might argue the
CISC-to-RISC move, and I personally think the JVM is pretty close) but no
other company has ever come close to the pure software engineering expertise
that IBM manages on a regular basis.

Joe