Re: Free/Cheap Midrange access?

On 5/29/2015 12:25 PM, Michael Ryan wrote:

> Sometimes. But I don't think the decline of the IBM midrange platform
> is due to people not being able to develop A/R programs in their
> basement for fun.

AAAAND That's an excellent point. This is just one reason why having your own 170 with say V5R3 running is mostly of little value. There just isn't a lot of stuff to learn there that is of great value to your future employer or the future of the platform. If you like that sort of thing or have some customers to support, sure go for it.

What the platform and IBM i Need is the ability to bring in developers who know Ruby and PHP and python and node.js and java and SQL. These folks turned loose can leverage all that data from years of running and modernize applications instead of replacing them.

This is much more than lipstick on a (flying?) pig too! It's not just a screen scraped green screen that has checkboxes and clicky buttons replacing 'X' and pressing a function key. Waaay behond that. BUT with all your business rules still there.

This is why it's important to have access to a newer system with current O/S in a supported environment. This way these new people with web and GUI skills can actually use those skills already learned on other platforms on IBM i. Then they will NOT say those dreaded words: "That AS/400 is old and ugly." Because that's not what it is any longer, unless you have a 170 on V5R3.....


- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

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