Re: OS/400 command set -- MIDRANGE-L

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Agreed James, OS/400 is "boring"
Good solid, reliable, dependable, and "boring"
But - boring to whom. To the propellor heads who want pictures, sound, and all
sorts of other gizmos, or to business who want a machine to do a job and don't
care about the "gimmicks". The iSeries can have "Gimmicks" should they be
required (eg. SMS messaging) via the appropriate attached external devices.
Applications can be GUIized, sound and video added via PC clients. The iSeries
can be the centre of all this, the repository and control centre of
applications. The iSeries doesn't need to be "boring".
Personally, I don't think OS/400 is any more, or any less, "boring" than any
other server system. It is the clients that do the exiting stuff, the servers
just serve.
Syd
This what the hype should be about.
James Rich wrote:

On Wed, 13 Nov 2002, Dr Syd Nicholson wrote:

I think one of the biggest battles the iSeries has with other systems is
the hype. There is a lot of hype for alternative systems, but nowhere
near enough for the iSeries. Most non-iSeries companies have never even
heard of the machine

Hype?  Well if you consider user enthusiasm as part of hype then maybe
that is true.  But what the iSeries "suffers" from is that it is boring.
That's why it is a good business platform.  It doesn't excite people to
try new things.  And not because it is expensive or hard to get (Sun and
DEC and others aren't cheap either).  When I was first exposed to a Sun
SPARC 10 I thought, "Wow, I could try some really interesting things on
this machine".  Some years ealier when exposed to the S/36 and then later
to the AS/400 I didn't have such a reaction.  Indeed, I thought, "There's
not really much to do on this computer".  That thought was reinforced at
my job when a senior programmer told me, "We don't do rocket science on
the AS/400, just business programming."
That mantra of "just business programming" is why the AS/400 suffers.
Mind you, it is very good at "just business programming".  But it doesn't
pique the
 interest of the development community at large.
Perhaps with the new languages and other features being added the iSeries
will become interesting.  But I believe that by and large it is still
"boring".  If you are not interested in business software there is
relatively little to do on it.
James Rich
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