Hello Larry,
my $.02, not necessarily addressed to just you.
Am 19.05.2023 um 15:18 schrieb Larry DrFranken Bolhuis <midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:
Can we PLEASE retire the 'whatever it's named today' and 'renamed every few years' drivel? ??
Every time I see it, it makes me wonder if the author has 35 years of experience on IBM i or 1 year of AS/400 experience 35 times.
I really don't understand all this fuss people are making because of a name. I still observe question marks over peoples heads when they're confronted with "IBM i on IBM Power hardware". If you say "formerly called AS/400", they suddenly know. Postings all over the net still mention AS/400 in addition to make people know what's the topic.
IBM tried to make the platform appear shiny and new by renaming it twice and largely failed. It's only "certain circles" where people seem to feel personally insulted when someone calls their shiny new Power 10 running IBM i "AS/400". And as long as those people respond in the usual way, other people might mock upon that.
Face it: you can't kill the term AS/400. Even IBM failed. The screens still look like they always did. Large portions of the OS still work like they always did, even if underlying code was changed. The hardware has changed, the OS was expanded with functionality; that was the promise about its layered architecture from the beginning. You can stick whatever label you want on it, but it can't deny its ancestry. And that unfortunately was OS/400 running on the AS/400, or in short "The AS/400". The latter not being reference to old hard- and software but to the platform at large, no matter wich age/generation. The last sentence I feel is utterly important to understand what's really going on: People using a common term to refer to different things!
If people can find a mutual agreement that
- IBM renamed the OS twice and that's nothing we can change, and they chose IBM i for the better or worse, and the name seems to stay,
- relaxing the sometimes ridiculous schoolmaster-like behavior from "the AS/400 is long dead" advocates,
we might find peace at last.
Also, one should be fair enough to admit that "AS/400" is much easier to say, write, and read than "IBM i running on IBM Power hardware".
Deal?
:wq! PoC
midrange.com
