Re: Linux and V5R2

[Jan Megannon <jmegannon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Prdaip,

Good to see you are still around. Spoke to you on the phone (from South
Africa) about a year ago. See in-line
On Tue, 2003-05-06 at 15:49, Pradip Shah wrote:
> 
> 
> I just had an interesting discussion with our IBM CE....
> 
To me it appears quite disconcerting that most of the recently mentioned
'interesting discussions' have been with CE's. What do the Marketing and
SE people say?
> 
> OS/400 is about 20+ years old.
> It is a character based OS.
> IBM has pushed it after as it can go.

As I said to my partner the other day, the 400/iSeries is often
perceived as old and legacy in the market because that is all we tend to
support on the system. We must introduce the customer to the 'rest' of
the machine (h/w and s/w). You will be amazed how many of the customers
we are talking to now do not understand the concept of IOA's and IOP's.
In a way, just these concepts of 'off-loading' the workload tends to
boggle them. And here I am speaking of managers who have been in the 400
arena for a while! They also never knew the other things the machine is
capable of!

Some of the newer ones also do not realize that the 400/iSeries is the
ONLY system/platform (I think)that can run and support all their code
from +- 20 years ago. I detest the love/hate relationship I have with
the platform : Love the machine, Hate IBM (not truly hate, just p*ss&d
off with them). There are many systems out there capable of similar
abilities to the 400/iSeries, but NOT the same thing.
  
> It is IBM's stated objective to go all out
> and support Linux.
 
Looking at what IBM did to OS/2, I fear for Linux then!

> One should not be surprised to see Linux kernel
> under OS/400 skin.
> 
>From my perspective, it is not how the system hangs together, but how I
can use it that makes it attractive to me. Let them put the iSeries
together with Sticky Tape, as long as I may still use it to provide the
optimum solution to my customer, with the best of:
        Inter-operability
        Functionality
        Connectivity
        Ease-of-use
        Backward-compatibility (to a degree)
        

Enough said. Let me go to bed!

Cheers,

Jan.