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I'm going to weigh in with the opposing viewpoint (now THERE'S a surprise, eh?<grin>). The AS/400 (and perhaps the entire continuum of the IBM midrange platform) is an absolutely unique development environment. Unlike any other machine that I've worked on, the AS/400 has allowed users to upgrade to newer and better hardware and software while still running their legacy applications. The fact that I can save a library off of an old CISC box, install it on a brand new RISC machine ten OS levels up, and run the applications - without so much as recompiling them - is absolutely unparalleled in the industry. Try moving a UNIX program from one box to another. Try moving it from one version of the operating system to another - that will almost never work. Heck, try moving it from one machine to another with the SAME version of the operating system, and the chances are it won't work. Why is the MAKE utility so important in UNIX land? Because you have to use it whenever you install a product! Now, in this day and age, the RPM utility that comes with Linux goes a long way toward allowing at least some cross-machine compatibility, but it's nothing like the AS/400. In the last five years or so, we've gone from a pure OPM, RPG-only (okay, COBOL too) environment to a fully Java-enabled, ILE capable, SQL-accessible machine - and yet the programs we wrote ten years ago STILL RUN. While I agree that the applications help make the machine, without this particular machine, there would be none of the applications. The IBM midrange platform has been the premier platform for business systems development, and if it doesn't continue to be, it's because we haven't learned yet how to take advantage of its unique capabilities in this brave new development world. Joe > Bob, I completely agree with this. On this list we've gone round > and round > the fundamental question "What is an AS/400?", trying to get IBM to market > "the AS/400," to save "the AS/400." But I don't think we've been able to > say exactly what the 400 is. Is it the reliable hardware? Other > computers > (Tandem?) have better uptime. Is it the stable OS? Other OSes > (System V?) > have similar stability records. Is it DDS instead of SQL? Is it GUI vs > Green Screen? > > The bottom line is that AS/400 is _the application software that the > customer runs on it_ I believe that if I wrote a Windows NT clone of > OS/400 and people could run their current application suite on cheap PC > hardware, they would abandon AS/400 hardware in droves, uptime or not. +--- | This is the Midrange System Mailing List! | To submit a new message, send your mail to MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com. | To subscribe to this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-SUB@midrange.com. | To unsubscribe from this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-UNSUB@midrange.com. | Questions should be directed to the list owner/operator: david@midrange.com +---
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