Re: IBM overhauls iSeries for the long haul -- MIDRANGE-L

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Shields, Ken wrote:

Sequence was Sys/3, Sys /34, Sys/38, Sys/36
The funny thing here was, and , I don't think there are enough people around to 
remember this , but
the Sys/38 (father of the AS400), was over-sold to business in North America, 
and moth balled by firms for many
moons, because, there were insufficient numbers of highly trained people to run 
them.


The S/38 was not a success the first time out. There was "nobody"
with any experience on the box or the software. The S/38 was
withdrawn from marketing due to some major performance problems,
which turned out to be memory related. This took almost a year
to fix.

You need to remember, the S/3,S/32,S/34,S/36 could all run the
same code with little or no changes. This created a long line
of customers very familar with SSP,OCL,RPG. This also created
a HUGE collection of software.

That's another reason why IBM, rushed to put the Sys/36 out in the market. The S/36 was so popular, that even to-day, on the current release of OS400, the Sys 36 Environment is still supported. I'm very curious to know just how many companies are still using the S36 Environment.

The S/36 came out to handle the demand for what was a very popular
and big selling box. The S/34 sold like hot cakes and was reallly a
follow on to the S/3. The S/34 really turned the corner for the
midrange folks and then the 5362 came along and they sold a TON
of them. The 5363 came later and again, a HUGE amount of those
boxes wer sold. This created a HUGE base of customers needing to
move on.

I know of two companies that had 4,000 S/36's installed between
the two of them.

There were many others.


Ken Shields
Oshawa systems group
Works 81, Oshawa Ontario
(905) 725-1144 Ext 326