RE: Cheaper Servers? - Been there - done that

Typical IBM thinking , a portable OS/400 for IBM people, in an enclosed world.
COMMON ....bad name, s/b NARROW

-----Original Message-----
From: jpcarr@tredegar.com [mailto:jpcarr@tredegar.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2002 10:50 AM
To: midrange-l@midrange.com
Subject: Re: Cheaper Servers? - Been there - done that



If you want to know some trivia about the beginnings of the "Huggable -
Luggable"
I was on a User Council to Rochester in the early 90's,(and Neil too?)
and Nora Craig hounded IBM to build one.
Some Skunk works went on, and they actually built one.  Showed it at
COMMON,  and it became a reality.
Nora actually got one for Free If I remember right for being the one who
forced/pushed/hounded it into creation.

I don't think it sold that good(for the reasons below).      I really don't
think you are going to see a "PC/400"  personally.

John Carr
--------------------------------------------------------------------
I got one of these. Great wee box.

Biggest drawbacks.

  - Too much heavy cabling to attache console, tape drive, etc.  Almost
makes it non-portable. If the console is not there it still works but
the yellow light is on and it displays an SRC code. If I go anywhere
with it I take a MAU, token ring cable, and a lap top as well. A lot of
stuff to lug about. Not taking the tape drive (which is a another
significabtly sized box) means I cannot do any back up, saves or
restores whilst away. The absence of the console cable when away from
office limits functions that may be required if something goes wrong. If
I don't leave all these things behind the machine is certainly not
portable.

 - Insufficient disk capacity - only 2 GB. Can't load this with much in
the way of applications/data. IBM always under sizes disks and charges a
small fortune for them.

 - Insufficent memory - its very slow - 24MB

It is still a useful machine still, even thought it is stuck on V3R2.
IBM only went part way with this one. I think it must have been an
experiment to see what kind of response they would get. Unfortnately,
they didn't make it portable enough, or give it sufficient capacity to
be realistic and this restricted sales. Perhaps another example of IBM
not quite understanding their customer requirements.

Syd Nicholson

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