Re: Some fodder for marketing, perhaps -- MIDRANGE-L

Obviously dropping support for twinax and/or SNA is not an example ofspending money. The money being spent is on the alternatives.

Our shop is primarily green screen (order entry), but I think that IBM(Rochester) does have a strategy (direction), and they even post it foranyone to read(http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/iseries/roadmap/). And I doubtToronto moved from RPG III (which was acceptable for green screenprocessing) to RPG IV and, especially, ILE just because they were bloodybored. While I, and people in a similar situation, may use the "new"features for green screen and batch apps, they appear to be almostmandatory for inter-systems processing.

The same goes for other enhancements. Prior to our company putting up aweb site for order taking, the only thing I used the IFS for was storingdocuments. Those API's that Scott demonstrated at his web site surecame in handy then!

No, IBM does have a direction in my opinion. I see it not only in theroadmap, but the real world enhancements they put into ILE RPG and, I'mguessing here, COBOL, as well as enhancements to the operating system.At the same time they have the business foresight to provide S/36compatibility, along with interoperability, They *give* us WDSc todevelop these modern applications. I.e., if we want to do so. Some ofus (moi) are still stuck in the 20th century.




        * Jerry C. Adams
*iSeries Programmer/Analyst
B&W Wholesale Distributors, Inc.* *
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Pat Barber wrote:

Uh....not to nit pick, but what are they spending all that
"money" on ???

I have been associated with this midrange thing a right long
time and I seriously question IBM "spending money" getting
everybody off dumb terminals. They appear to be dropping support
for twinax and SNA, but that's hardly "spending money".

They seem to have very little direction and it has made a major
impact on the entire midrange market place.

A good many customers have no idea where IBM is headed and it
would appear that, neither does IBM.

I don't consider several name changes of the machine a
"major investment".



Jon Paris wrote:

 They are investing heavily in getting everybody OFF

dumb terminals - QINTER isn't used for anything but dumb terminals - so why

would they spend a cent on it?