RE: New Subject: Series/1 -- MIDRANGE-L

When I say new, I mean it in a relative term.  The 400 has been around (by
this name anyway) for what, 13 years?  And prior to that, quite some time as
previous iterations (36/38).  2 years experience is a newbie in this world -
I hold much respect for those who have been with it from the birth.  Thanks
for the links.

jch

ps- I earned the certs (Assoc. Op, Prof. Op, SysAdmin), I don't supervise
people with them.

-----Original Message-----
From: MacWheel99@aol.com [mailto:MacWheel99@aol.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2001 1:26 PM
To: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
Subject: Re: New Subject: Series/1


Al thanks to past discussion here & similar groups - most of the URLs in
this 
post originated in cut & paste from other people who answer Al dumb
questions 
in the past & continue to answer my questions today.

>  From:    Justin.Haase@Kingland.com (Haase, Justin C.)
>  
>  For us "New to the AS/400-iSeries world" folks, could someone give some
>  background on the Series/1 and perhaps a website or two a person could
>  navigate to?  Thanks!
>  
>  Justin C. Haase
>  Midrange Systems Engineer - Kingland Systems Corporation
>  IBM Certified AS/400 Systems Administrator
>  phone - 641.355.1035

How can you be new to this area & also certified in it?
Or am I misreading your title ... 
You are administrator of people who are certified, but you are not?

I am assuming that when you say "Series/1" you are doing a misprint of 
"i-Series" & not referring to the IBM Series/1 that I worked on for a while 
at one employer before the S/38 was rebranded into the AS/400.  Series/1 is
a 
totally different animal, kind of an IBM imitation of Microsoft talent in 
creating periodic Blue Screens of Death.

We used a non-IBM system on it known as RPL - Oh God I am glad to no longer 
be in that environment, it was like a step back in time to Symbolic Assember

where the OS wasn't smart enough to keep track of its own disk space.  I am 
also glad to be no longer doing Symbolic Assembler, which was a programming 
language of the punched card era.

It could be that what my employer at the time was running on Series/1 was a 
bit brain dead & that colored my impressions.  They had outgrown their S/34 
(this was also before the S/36 was announced) & had decided that for a 
solution they would move their accounting applications from S/34 to this 
other package on S/1 & I had been hired as programmer to help with that 
project.  

I tried to explain that S/34 RPG was much more business friendly than S/1
RPL 
& that rather than having one major application on S/34 & another major 
application on S/1, the business would be better served by having two S/34 
interconnected via a modem-eliminator so that they could also act as backup 
to each other ... if you have major downage, the business continues, because

you got good backups & a computer that can run any of your applications, 
although not all at same time.

My lesson got driven home after a few episodes of one computer or another 
down for a couple of weeks waiting on IBM parts, so they decided I was right

& since they were not going to do this conversion after all, they did not 
need me, so I was out of that job.  Another reason the whole episode has a 
bit of a bad taste in my mouth memories.

Continuing with my assumption which could be totally bogus as usual.

IBM has about a million web sites - here are a miniscule sampling

Some of these URLs that I have not visited in a while may have changed due
to 
IBM rebranding

http://www.ibm.com/servers/eserver/iseries/nation/
http://www.iseries.ibm.com/handbook/v4r5/
http://www.as400.ibm.com/encycl/volume.htm
http://www.as400.ibm.com/db2/db2main.htm
http://www.as400.ibm.com/clientaccess/
http://www-3.ibm.com/services/learning/community/as400/pie.html
http://www.training.ibm.com/ibmedu/spotlight/as400.html

Do you remember how you signed up for MIDRANGE-L?
Get to the home page of www.midrange.com & go exploring the links there

There are many other independent efforts like midrange dot com, although 
structured quite differently in mixture of services & information access, 
such as

http://www.as400journal.com/
http://400times.co.uk
http://www.midrangesystems.com/

Or you might go to the Cincinnati Ohio User Group - click on their links
page 
- then click on Kent Anderson

http://www.tsmug.org

Or for a little bit of cynical historical prespective, 
read the essays on "State of the Midrange" at

www.wash-midrange.org

Or other historical perspective that is more IBM friendly such as

http://itknowledge.com/reference/1882419669.html

and what are the differences between NT & AS/400 - you could look in recent 
archives of this forum or

http://www.as400.ibm.com/conslt/nt.htm

There are also major independent trade publications on i-Sieries & AS/400
... 
I hesitate to call these places mere "sites" they are more like a cross 
between Library of Congress & the C-Span of an on-line computer conference

http://www.as400network.com
http://www.midrangecomputing.com/forums/
http://www.as400magazine.com

There is also coverage of i-Series & AS/400 by major computer trade 
publications that are independent of our world

http://www.infoworld.com/news/as400.html
http://www.ddj.com/articles/2000/0065/0065f/0065f.htm

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)


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