Re: AIX - i5/OS feature comparison was the notorious Steve's soapbox

First I probably should stay out of this thread since I do not buy
i5's - I just use them.
Nice thread to stir up the pot. I am a little surprised at some of the
viewpoints (again not having the price point pain of choosing or
justifying). Yes, IBM has totally blown opportunities to make os/400 a
household word - so be it. I know more about Vista than anything in
the IBM pipeline, and I am not trying. Is it possible that I/T and the
i5 are suffering from the Walmart effect and other vendors winning in
the race to the cookie jar? Have you seen the Vista OS
options/versions. there are EVEN MORE! paying over and over for the
same garbage. It's worse than taxes. Those people are *gifted*
marketers.

Year after year when I am standing in line at the "IBM point-of-sale
checkout" I am reminded how great of an operating system idea the
point of sale was/is. I can not recall seeing an ad for IBM POS. What
was the secret of success? Besides that it actually addressed the
business issues, nobody had a chance to monkey with the OS and it
remained reliable. No freeware, DLL's blowing up or trojans.

Next,  I was doing just fine before windows surfaced, but it's hard to
beat cut & paste to several 5250 sessions, I think we all bought into
that and now can not program without the aid of windows tools (vendors
win again). Lovely progress. That is where the difference is in
Win$ows vs targeted business system. Must peddle Windows as a
comprehensive problem solver since it has no purpose other than ease
of use. Convince us that viruses are a fact of life and buy a whole
other disk to make a copy on in case the public intruder erases our
data today. Risk factor? I would say yes.

The same reliability that is true for IBM POS and mainframes have
applied to OS/400 since day one. You notice that xSeries was/is a
hardware/services play - and unique to IBM offerings in this way
without OS and should havebeen the first dropped.. I will admit that
integrating all the tcp stuff in OS/400 was the equivalent of a "fall
from grace" on perfection but OS survival trumped dependability. I am
amazed at the job IBM team has done keeping up with and holding
together a tight ship. I thought it would get much worse. We should be
somewhat happy about that.

Finally, I remember some of the story behind silverlake and the 7,000
programmers making the project work (some of you may have first hand
knowledge). They get my vote hands down, has anyone bothered to do a
function comparison between AIX and iSeries? No brainer I believe. If
I had to choose 1 to stay with until retirement, take a guess. OS/400
is not the work of a couple of university guys trying to multitask DOS
.The mainframe OS's are in my #2 spot. But a little too rigid for my
taste given a choice. I would miss plug & play or "vary on device".( I
have programmed all of these platforms at one point or another)

I enjoyed learning AIX,  I think anyone who has can easily see that
AIX is simply the IBM flavor of Unix, same weakness/strengths. Same
CRON. better support than any other arguably. You can load any
software to do anything, that is not a new concept. I needed a 1,000
page book to get going in AIX on the iSeries I just typed "GO main"
and F4 until I got the hang of it.

I recall seeing real ROI that was hard to beat for iSeries. It
compared server farms to the  iSeries. Did that disappear? Judging
from the thread this is getting harder to realize (or remember). But
we do that analysis on windows in a spreadsheet most likely? And if we
do it at a website, we do not utilize the iSeries to render it? but it
can serve it? AIX can surely serve and render such a page and
spreadsheet. If that is what your business needs in the one box.

Since hardware is becoming (has become) insignificant, perception and
economics could kill any box and the I5 altogether, hard to disagree
with that.
But killing i5 it would be the biggest computer waste in my lifetime.
I have become a real believer in marketing by living through this.
Unfortunately, Silverlake two, never got off the drawing board and we
will not see a better OS in our lifetime - probably? I think IBM will
make the P5 and I5 able to run both OS's (and Vista and everything
else using the correct HAL)  and basically be flexible for the future
directions. No longer a closed controlled world. (the automaker
example in thread said it all)

About SQL, sure...there is a lot of buzz 24/7 about all sorts of
advantages. if MySQL is the answer I need to get retrained. MySQL is
not free so what is the advantage? Hmmm... I think the articles I have
been seeing in the mags recently are very "behind the times" catering
to the entrenched. RPG is not the only game in town. I learned on
RPGII and it was not intuitive. COBOL was a better plan to me. But
either (any dialect) works for me these days. Why limit yourself?
These languages that came to be were well thought plans, not accidents
and half baked answers like "my language on rails"  SQL set at a time
processing will never be record processing, and vica versa. Each has
it's place. I use SQL often but it did not replace anything. Is it not
more difficult and clumsy to use SQL to perform record processing
than 3GL or 4GL? If you start a thread about debugging SQL sets I will
be sure to read it.

Instead of business choosing p5 i5 z5 or x5...I would hope we have a
platform check-off list that picks the right OS and apps. And I would
guess that almost all (very few startup's by comparison) have already
done so and the decision is not and never was easy to migrate during
expansion/consolidation. Most of the time you spend making new code
and apps and releases run in the same resource, squeezing more life
out of the old dog. Perhaps a source of some list groaning.

My opinion only - I represent only myself.