Re: Has an End of Service date been announced for the S/36 environmen t in OS...

We currently use M/36 & are not concerned that IBM no longer offers this 
feature for sale to new customers, or that support termination is upon us.  
What concerns me is the notion that applications running in that climate 
might conflict with a future OS/400 upgrade.  OS/400 comes out with so many 
new things & goodbye this & that ... it is very easy to miss something 
important to us in the roar of announcements, then elect to do an upgrade to 
a later OS/400 that robs us of a neccessary application that needed to go 
through a conversion first.

Many IBM partners keep older copies of IBM hardware & operating system for 
the convenience of their customers.  If you lease your AS/400 such that when 
the lease expires the product has zero value & you allowed to keep it, you 
might consider keeping an old AS/400 and old OS/400 version on it in storage 
for the purpose of getting at archives that exist in a reality of media & 
services that IBM has dropped from contemporary service.  There would be 
issues of legality & service if the old box needs help to operate it, but 
this is one approach you could consider if you cannot find such an IBM 
partner in your geography.

This is a sort of issue we all have to deal with as media evolves.
When we left diskettes, we had over 10,000 of the 8" diskettes for off-line 
storage.
Then we moved from QIC tapes to 8 mm to yet another media & our current box 
cannot read the 8 mm tapes ... we had to consider how to get at our archives 
when we made each upgrade.
Some archives are of data using a version of software we are no longer on, 
and a software package we have abandoned so there is a question of legality 
of accessing it.  Many angles to consider.

We have pallets with boxes of print outs stored out of the way, because many 
users prefer to work with ancient reports than have to figure out how to use 
old versions of software we have not touched in years, should the case arise 
that the IRS needs to see our payroll data from several years ago on the old 
payroll system, or some other outfit needs to see data associated with a 
hardware software combination we have long since departed.

>  From:    DianaH@jupiter.fl.us (Diana Hicks)
>  
>  I have read that the Advanced 36 SSP will be discontinued in the next
>  release or version of OS/400.  However, I have not found anything on the
>  S/36 environment.  We do not use this environment except when archived
>  (purged) data from our disposed S/36 must be restored.  Some of this data
>  must be kept for a large number of years according to state government laws
>  and I'd prefer not to convert all the data to the OS/400 format.
>  
>  Please let me know if IBM has made any announcements or statement of
>  direction for the S/36 environment.  Thanks.
>  
>  
>  Diana Hicks
>  Town of Jupiter
>  dianah@jupiter.fl.us


Al Macintyre  ©¿©
http://www.cen-elec.com MIS Manager Programmer & Computer Janitor

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