What is an AS/400?

[MacWheel99@xxxxxxx]

Rob,

There are several outfits that have white papers comparing the AS/400 to 
other operating systems.  I would imagine that they all would be willing to 
work with you, at no cost to you, to jointly craft a summary statement of 
what they have to say about its primary advantages and disadvantages, 
provided that statement has good relevant links to their white papers & other 
services.

For example, on your web site page in the section "What is an AS/400?" you 
might have a statement like this:

Worldwide there are about 250,000 AS/400s in use.

The X Group (an independent business technology analysis organization) says 
that the major advantages of the AS/400 over other operating systems, such as 
Windows NT, UNIX, and LINUX, include:
lowest lifetime operating cost for comparable responsibilities;
superior reliability, with the least unplanned down-time;
leader in data base integration;
superior performance, with mature tools to methodically manage this;
winner of latest contests for speed of transaction processing;
superior scalability totally 64 bit but 128 bit design;
the best java support in the industry;
excellent for managing enterprise middleware;
extreme security, such as NEVER being infected by a computer virus.

However they also point out that while the AS/400 is perfectly capable of 
hosting PC LAN & internet services, such as e-commerce, there are operating 
systems superior for this kind of task.  To see the whole story on this & 
explanations of the importance of each of these & other elements, check out 
the following white papers.

Links to that Group's relevant white papers.

With sub-heads on each group, that someone at beginning of your page can use 
HTML to rapidly jump to, you would want to include:

Frank's book at midrange dot com
Andrews Consulting Group that Janet works with
Gartner Group reports that are widely quoted
D.H. Brown's report that I briefly reviewed Aug 9 after the link was provided 
by Scott

Probably other outfits are involved in the URLs cited by this thread, that we 
have not yet got a round TUIT on looking into, but I am sure some other 
poster will illuminate, commenting on my post.

You might have an introductory section with links to the home pages of each 
of these outfits with short piece on who they are, then what they agree on 
with respect to where AS/400 leads LINUX UNIX NT.  Also mention that the 
AS/400 is a multi-OS machine in which the best of all worlds can run off the 
same platform.  If you have an application that only NT can run, you can run 
it off NT while running NT off of OS/400 & your users can icon click off the 
same browser interface or DOS-like menu an applications that could run off 
many different OS, then when in the middle of one OS application, hot key to 
one running on a different OS.

A distinction needs to be made between platform for client & for server.  
Many of your individual employees & internet customers might be running work 
stations powered by Windows, LINUX, (name some of the others) on a PC, MAC, 
NC, or twinax 5250, while the host server is on AS/400.  The 400 can support 
all of the examples named, while most other OS can only support some of them.

Now while we on MIDRANGE-L know what all of those abbeviations in the above 
paragraph are referring to, it would not hurt to have links to a glossary 
section, since a fair number of visitors to your site might not be aware of 
NC or 5250 & a little blurry on others that you might list, so an "Oh Yeh, 
what the heck is that?" link can dramatically enhance the overall 
user-friendliness of your site.

Rob, feel free to use any of the text that you have found in my writings.  
Although you might want to give me editorial review of your selection, since 
my reply might include ... oh in this section I was really quoting someone 
else & I did a sloppy job of giving credit where it was due.

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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