RE: OS400 release levels

["Klein, Ron" <ron.klein@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

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I was a little surprised to not see V3R2 on the list also.  We have a pretty
good customer base on V3R2.  Our products are really packaged and then the
support is where we are actually trying to make our money, so some of the
software is 18 to 20 years old and has been modified considerably over the
years.  However, there is quite a few customers that have no intention of
buying new boxes or upgrading the OS.

We just installed a new 820 and had to make sure that IBM would sell us an
OS at V4R5 so that we would be backwards compatible enough for most of our
customers.  Our newest project that has taken about 3 years to complete is
written in RPGILE and SQLRPG and when started the requirement was for those
customers to be at V4R2 or above.  And most of them are at V4R5 or V5R1
already.

Unfortunately being a development company we do tend to stay a ways behind
the cutting edge since it would just be a futile effort to program in
something that will not run for the customers.

Ron


>30% @ V3R7 - WOW...
>
>That must really hamper development using new stuff for you folks.

And V3R7 is way better than V3R2, the last CISC release.  V3R7 added long
procedure names, *STRING support, and a bunch of other useful stuff.

I was surprised to *not* see any V3R2 in that list, as those customer can't
upgrade without new hardware.

V3R7 folks just didn't join software subscription, and don't want to spend
the
money for an OS upgrade now.  Or maybe they didn't have the 64MB main memory
required for V4R1.  (Yikes!  But my 40S machine came with 32MB from IBM...)

Doug
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