Re: Ardent Supporters (was Re: Have you read this?)

Dean,

I hear what you're saying.

The fact that the B series had a S/36EE so IBM wouldn't lose their loyal
and happy S/36 customer base has locked IBM into upward compatibility
and made the customers complacent and reluctant to adopt newer/better
methods.

Maybe the Y series should have been the path to the 236 and the B series
could have separated the wheat from the chaff.  The 436 would have been
the appropriate migration solution.

Just a thought, how about making something old new again.  The S/38 did
not have a S/34EE but did have a migration tool.  What if IBM would have
made a model change where RPGII/RPGIII were not supported but
converted.  Even at V3 a site could choose RPGLE, but have no real
compelling reason to switch to RPGLE, and that's a no brainer.

Once you're there, you'll use every feature at your disposal.  IMHO, V4
could have been a good place to make such a separation.  It leaves me
wondering, if a 7xx machine runs a S/36EE, which big name customer is
IBM trying to make happy?

Historically, IBM only develops products for large clients and offers
that solution to the general public as an afterthought.  Like, I've been
told that the only reason the 5363 existed was for the US Postal service
and Farmers Insurance.  The rest of the users were nothing more than
filling plant capacity to reduce cost to the only clients that mattered
to IBM.

It's late and I'm starting to ramble, but I hear ya.  Maybe the AS/6000
will be the machine to kill off the old code.


DAsmussen@aol.com wrote:
> 
<<snip>>
> 
> The problem is that IBM has made it _TOO_ easy to move forward.  Back when I
> used to migrate /36 accounts for a living, I was constantly having OCL and
> RPG commands fail because they were supported 34>36 but not 36>400.  Now that
> the code's across, ILE is hard to come by "in the field" but
> program-described files and left-hand indicators are easy to run across.
> Some people have to be _FORCED_ to use a new paradigm.  The "we'll upgrade it
> when we get the time" excuse seems to never get the time.  I find it ironic
> that lack of a migration path was probably the biggest gripe everyone had
> moving from the S/3 to the /32/34/36, yet the very existence of that
> migration path (due to the so-called "open systems" movement) has stagnated
> the use of the wonderful things that Hans and his contemporaries are
> providing for us and forcing a knee-jerk move to JAVA ("open systems" once
> again).
> 
<<snip>>
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