Re: California Software/Infinite Corporation

On 2/26/2015 11:12 AM, Don wrote:

As I recall (and this has been MANY YEARS) they or someone like them had a
really decent (NO DONGLE REQUIRED) AS/400 emulator that ran on PC...you
could port your files, RPG Code, etc....did a review of them for the
magazine but since it wasn't a product that actually ran on the 400 the
article got punted...imagine...rumour was IBM didn't like the idea of cost
effective competition :)

Don, I respect your opinion but I pretty much have to hold agreement in
abeyance for a bit. If there really was a cost effective alternative to
AS/400 + OS/400, I'm pretty sure all of us would know the name of the
vendor and their product straightaway. I recall Baby/36 and it was only
barely adequate for moving a 6 user shop up from a by then very tired
System/32. As you note, that was many years ago.

But the product was great....wish I could remember the name...if I get the
chance I'll check my articles archives...but heck, ask for a 30 day demo and
play with it....considering where IBM ISN'T going and hasn't been going with

I'm really loving IBM i 7.2. The new SQL abilities are sweet, fully
free RPG is a joy to work with and the Power 7 hardware just screams. I
got Node.js to run, and a dinosaur like me even manages a PHP script
that surfaces some SQL stored procedures which give my boss a very crude
web portal. Crude because I worked on it, but cool because it's all IBM
i - no multiple platform debugging headaches, yay! I recognise that
opinions legitimately differ but that seems like forward motion to me.

the iSeries(or whatever that relocated aussie is calling it this week) I'd
say it's worth taking a sniff at!

<editorial> 'This week'? </editorial>

With respect to the 'Infinite i' marketing materials, they claim they
can convert at the source code level from the highly proprietary, closed
and expensive IBM platform to an Open System (their caps, not mine) like
Windows and Oracle. Open? Inexpensive? Ehhhh, OK.

If I were in OPs shoes, I'd be calling someone like iTech or RZKH to
propose a cloud solution. I can't tell, but from the sounds of it his
company may be tired of green screen. If that's the case, then neither
Infinite I nor a cloud IBM i solution is going to satisfy. Of course,
I'm cynical enough to believe that someone in management just wants
numbers to show how expensive and ugly it will be to move off of IBM i,
so there's that.