RE: Thats all folks! -- MIDRANGE-L

On Tue, 17 Dec 2002, Joe Pluta wrote:

> this strategy.  In the end, there will be two markets: cheap and industrial
> strength.  The cheap market will be the low-end client who isn't hurt by
> regular downtime and data loss, and will factor it in as part of the cost of
> doing business.  Windows/*nix will play well here.  But for the industrial
> strength market, the AS/400 is the choice to beat, IMO.

Joe, I don't know about windows, but I certainly haven't experienced
regular downtime or data loss on the various unix server I admin (noting
the play box I mentioned in another post as the exception).  My unix boxen
are more available than my AS/400s because they have less scheduled
downtime.  Now I don't really compare their availability as better or
worse because I am using them for different purposes.  Perhaps if I ran
the same apps on both OSes I would need to schedule more downtime for the
unix machines.  But data loss absolutely never happens.  Unscheduled
downtime (excepting power outages that take out both machines) does not
happen.  The AS/400 does not hold an advantage here, neither is it at a
disadvantage.  However do note my post in another thread about
hardware/sofware advantages shared by non-PC platforms.

> But Scott, the AS/400 has had the most radical series of changes of any
> platform in the last year, five years, 10 years, whatever period you want.
> The fine folks at IBM are constantly expanding the machine.  Lately we've
> gotten ILE, Java, free-form RPG, WebSphere, Linux and LPAR, just to name a
> few.  Compared to us, Unix evolves at a snail's pace, and Windows doesn't
> evolve, it simply puts out new versions.  (What's the difference?  Well, our
> programs written 10 years ago still run - try that on a Windows machine.
> Except don't get me started on WebSphere SE and V5R2.)

ILE is very similar to the language bindings available on other platforms.
A C program can have python modules and perl bundles and java components.
This is nothing unique to OS/400.  Java existed first on Sun, later on
windows, later on others.  free-form RPG is just bringing RPG to be more
syntactically similar to other free form languages.  WebShere evolves
equally rapidly on all the platforms it runs on.  Linux (obviously)
started elsewhere and also supports guest OSes through third party
applications.  LPAR is similar (though not the same - possibly better) to
Sun's partitioning.  In many ways the AS/400 is catching up to what other
systems have been doing for a long time.  In other areas it is evolving at
about the same rate.  Where it stands out from other platforms is not in
its speed of change, but in its uniqueness: RPG, DDS, database access,
etc.  If these unique components fit your needs (which they do for many)
then it is a better machine than the others.

That it can run 10 year old code is great and helps my shop which has code
older than that, I suspect that it really isn't much of a selling point
(though I'm not a salesman, so it may be).  I just don't know about the
impact of the statement, "Hey, you can run 10 year old programs on this
baby!"

James Rich