AS/400 vs PC as a server -Reply

Rich wrote:
> I was talking to an associate yesterday on the 
> life of midrange computers.  His view was that
> the PCS will take over the industry and there
> will be no use for Midrange or Mainframes.

Doubtless this guy is a VB consultant trying to
enlarge his client base!  I'd have to disagree with
him, not necesssarily because of data volumes
(hell, you can buy PCs for <$1000 w/hard drive
capacities {DASD, to us AS/400 types} measured in
Gigabytes) but because of security and reliability. 
It's all well and good to have a pretty GUI on your
app, but when some hacker wanders into your files
and wreaks havoc and/or GPF's appear all from
hell to breakfast, your powers that be do start
to wonder about the value of it all.

This is not to say that security/reliability can not
be addressed in the PC world - it can.  It just
takes orders of magnitude more effort that it
does in the AS/400 world.  I for one see a future
for the AS/400 at least as a back end database
server to PC's doing pretty GUI's and EUDA (End
User Data Access) - let each box do what it's good
at!

IMHOP

Scott Cornell, Mercy Information Systems
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