Re: What is an AS/400? -- MIDRANGE-L

Look at Al Barsa's post on Netscape Security problem.  Give some statistics 
on the rate at which the PC world has to put up with security scares of one 
kind or another ... my anti virus is protecting me against 50,000 viruses in 
the wild.  I get my AV updated about once every 10 days & when I do so, I 
browse the NAV support forum on what's the latest hassles ... they are 
getting hundreds of posts a day from new victims, although most of the tales 
of woe are from people who did not get it on the degree of self-training 
needed to use these PC products & stay out of trouble.  What kind of cost 
does it add to businesses running on recent state-of-art Windows world to 
have to protect against this kind of nonsense?

AS/400 does not (yet) have these kind of problems (viruses & hackers) 
although the bad guys are trying to figure out how to get into AS/400, they 
are still thinking in Unix & PC terms, and IBM has decades of white hat 
security for them to penetrate when they do understand midrange systems.

Check archives on "So if there is no Hardware specific Advertising" ... Jim 
Franz had a post 7/18 am or 7/17 pm regarding major differences between 
AS/400 & the competition ..

security, data base integration, backup & recovery, scalability, availability 
24x7x365, staff size needed for management, 3-5 year operations cost, we do 
not get illegal operations or general protection faults, the OS handles disk 
space management ... it is unneccessary for MIS or end users to be doing 
housekeeping tasks like scan disk or speed disk or optimize placement, and we 
never lose clusters.

When we have multiple hard drives, we do not have to specify which hard drive 
something is on, the addressing is continuous.  We do not have to come up 
with a system for packaging the data that works for the BIOS & end up with 
wasted space, because ... well explain the significance of 64 bit operating 
system on 64 bit hardware.

When we get a new release of the operating system, it comes with thousands of 
enhancements & for our current applications there is UPWARD COMPATIBILITY 
which means that we do not have to spend big bucks & inconvenience to replace 
applications that run on the old OS with the version that runs on the next 
OS.  We can pick & choose which of the features of the new OS we want to use 
& for those we are not using, we do not have to clutter our hard drive.

Upward Compatibility is a concept that was invented in the Midrange world 
several decades ago, but it has not yet been reinvented for the PC world.  
There is so much like this that we take for granted today, but is worth a 
sentence or bullet in your document, with perhaps a link to a larger 
definition.

Now it is true that for every thousand enhancements, we tend to lose one old 
feature & sometimes some people were using that feature.

We do get some strange error messages.

MIS staff has to know what we are doing with a system that is NOT the same as 
UNIX LINUX Windows DOS etc.

I asked in an earlier thread about a similar question ... facts about the 
AS/400 & white papers that put these facts into a perspective that is 
understandable to the non-technical person who knows squat about platforms & 
languages, but understands operating cost, staffing size, down time, disaster 
recovery ... and here are bookmarks to some links I gotta check out some 
time, some suggested by John Carr & Janet Krueger ... I have barely scratched 
this surface, but along the way found some interesting links, so some of the 
bookmarks here did not come from recent MIDRANGE-L posts but rather from some 
place I got to by following suggestions read here.

http://solar.rtd.utk.edu/~mtaylor/vendors.html
http://news.excite.com/news/zd/000721/13/ibm-wins-oracle
http://www.lansa.com/ - take SPOTLIGHT link to AS/400 sites powered by LANSA
http://www.ignite400.org/ - take SHOWCASE link to AS/400 sites by industry
http://www.firstcalldirect.ie - take MOTOR link
http://www.common.org
http://www.midrange.com
http://www.infoworld.com/testcenter/index_f.html
http://www.infoworld.com/news/as400.html
http://www.as400network.com/str/pdfs/
http://www.dhagroup.com
http://www.as400.ibm.com/whpapr/index.htm
http://www.as400.ibm.com/developer/porting/pubs.htm
http://www.yourdon.com/index.htm
http://ctdp.homestead.com/files/index.html

I do not remember the subject title of the thread that talked about WHY 
Microsoft could not get 1200 NT servers to replicate 23 AS/400ds.  My 
recollection was that it had to do with enforcing business rules across 
terabytes of data.  NT servers can handle the data from a user access 
perspective, they just cannot talk effectively to the other servers, from 
perspective of the data being logically consistent.  AS/400ds can talk 
effectively to other AS/400ds, and handle the data management cross-indexing 
issues that come with terabytes of information.

But there are three issues here for your project - we need to communicate 
what the AS/400 is NOT, in terms of the garbage that other computer systems 
ARE, then we need to communicate what the AS/400 IS, for those topics that 
are so alien to the rest of the computer world that they do not know how to 
appreciate what they do not have.  And it has to be crammed into a format 
that is friendly to any visitor.

Consider the format of the site
http://www.moosoft.com/tc3vsav.html

Now this outfit is claiming that the major anit-virus packages do a lousy job 
of protecting against Trojans & THEY do a much better job, but hey, I still 
have a major package because Trojans are only one part of a bigger picture.

However, I mention them because of the format.
Chart features that one might expect to find in most major computer systems & 
what is unique about each ... include traditional hassles & how they 
translate in operating cost & staffing overhead, then place some rankings.

This is a major problem, minor problem, non-existant problem for this 
particular type of computer system.  This is wonderful from perspective of 
software aquisition costs & end user ease of use (e.g. externally defined 
universal relational data base that is accessible by so many different 
languages & user tools).  Which other systems have anything comparable & if 
you can get it, how much extra $$$ does it cost?

So at the high level, you have concepts like UPWARD COMPATIBILITY which 
OS/400 has but Windows etc. does not have & this is in the section on good 
things to have in a computer system ... and concepts like VIRUSES & HACKERS 
which OS/400 does not have, but Windows etc, do have & this is in the section 
on added costs of doing business using this operating system which most 
businesses do not want.

Then there is a link for each ingredient or bullet in your chart to define 
what is this concept of VIRUSES that OS/400 does not have, with links on the 
Windows side to the cost to business to have to protect against them & links 
on the OS/400 side to evidence that this is not part of the OS/400 reality, 
and in each side, cross-linked so while reviewing OS/400 evidence that this 
is not a reality here, can get to stories on what the cost is for dealing 
with this on the kinds of computers vulnerable to them.

So I am suggesting a format that at the high level just has a list of simple 
statements regarding AS/400 advantages & each one has a link to more 
information, in which you might have a whole page for each of the simple 
statements, filled with links to more information related to that one concept.

Al Macintyre  ���
MIS Manager Green Screen Programmer & Computer Janitor of BPCS 405 CD Rel-02 
running on AS/400 V4R3 http://www.cen-elec.com Central Industries of 
Indiana--->Quality manufacturer of wire harnesses and electrical 
sub-assemblies
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