Re: The "greying of Common" Is it still true?

> So, my question:  Has the situation changed? Are there young people in
> your shop? Is the AS/400 going the way of the Shaker villages?

I win.  I'm 21.

I'm a hardcore AS/400 lover, but I constantly find myself annoyed with IBM
and the AS/400.

The documentation, for example, is atrocious.  The softcopy library is
indespensible, but the viewer utility seemed clunky two years ago; now it's
pathetically out of date, and actually starting to exhibit weird buggy
behaviour in W2K.  IBM's site is absolutely the last place I go for AS/400
information.  It's a bizarre form of torture in which I click through a maze
of vague, tantalizing-yet-not-truly-informative links.

IBM's advertising is also atrocious, which is odd.  There's nothing to it.
The box sells itself.  All IBM has do to is say what it does.  It'd take 15
seconds on television.  Facts and numbers, not pretty pictures.

The fact that the AS/400 is still around at all is amazing.  It's a
testament to its brilliant architecture.

But it doesn't matter.  More and more, I wonder whether or not there's any
exciting future to be had with the AS/400.  Of course it'll still be around
in ten years, but will it be current and relevant?

If I set up a site, it'll most likely be with some free distribution of
unix, apache, and php3.  I have the vague impression that the AS/400 can run
something analagous to php3 or active server pages, but why go to all the
effort of finding the information that IBM's hidden on their site when it's
so easy to find the tools/information elsewhere?  If _I'm_ too fed up to
look, surely no executive will have the perseverance.

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