Re: A dumb *S36 question

On Saturday 15 September 2001 05:50 am, ken shields wrote:
> Al
>       You could train someone to be proficient on the /36 in 1 day, I'm still
> stumbling through the syntax on the /400.
>       Somewhere along the road, IBM forgot their own credo:
>       K.I.S.S.  keep it simple stupid.
> Ken

I've got to disagree, Ken. It isn't that "IBM forgot" or whatever. It is that
you cannot add the level of control and versatility of the AS/400 without
becoming more complex. I loved the simplicity of the S/32, S/34, and S/36. I
never worked on a S/38 (although I broke one once in the IBM datacenter).

When my first AS/400 arrived in '88 it was shipped without manuals (I bought
from a BP who played games with the ordering and so the manuals weren't
shipped for a year). To get top dollar for my S/36 I had sold it before the
AS/400 had arrived with the agreement that I'd ship it within 30 days of my
AS/400's arrival.

Of course, I'd migrated lots of S/34s to S/36 in the wink of an eye, how
tough could the migration to an AS/400 be?

The first couple of weeks were chewed up badly because of a clone 5250
emulation board that kept failing and giving an error on the AS/400 that
looked like a failing bus on the AS/400 causing the CEs who were not familiar
yet with AS/400s to think the drives were crashing.

But within the month I migrated us, learned to use PDM instead of POP,
rewrote all our foolish WSU based programs, and fell in love with the AS/400.

I bought it looking for a bigger, faster S/36 that would support a greater
number of remote workstations via dial up lines. But I found it to be a
wonderful machine that, due to its very nature, was easy for me to get work
done at a much faster pace.

I feel that using the AS/400 "at the level" of a System/36 isn't very
difficult once you learn to think in AS/400 terms. Once there, you have the
whole world of AS/400 capabilities opened up to you.

--
Chris Rehm
javadisciple@earthlink.net

And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart...
...Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other
commandment greater than these. Mark 12:30-31