Thanks all RE: Help required to stop this company replacing their iSeries

Hi All,

 Thanks to all for your comments, there is a lot of food for thought there. 

I think the bosses "grey haired" comment was basically that he thinks we are a 
dying breed (appologies to the young snapper whippers out there :-) ) and that 
he will not have anyone to do his programming in future.

The job here is basically loading and unloading cargo planes so I think that 
the stability of the box is of paramount importance, and I think you will all 
agree that he cannot get a much more stable (stabler? is there such a word?) 
box than the one he has. I will just get my colleague here to put some of the 
points to him, and back him up when and where I can.

The comments on training are worth mentioning, I taught myself RPGIII, many 
years ago, on a S/38 coming from an ICL operating background, so if I can do it 
anyone can. A few years ago when I was a manager at a small software house we 
were having trouble finding programmers (money mainly) so I persuaded my boss 
to go for 'people off the street' we took on 4 trainees ranging from 17 to 35, 
we had 2 who went onto bigger and better things in RPG, 2 dropped out, one 
because of the green screen programming, he wanted more "modern" stuff, he was 
18 the other guy was 29. 

I think another thing is the green screen. Although I do not see why anyone who 
just scans bar codes all day, checks the readout and pushes a button needs the 
functionality of a PC and all the GUI stuff that goes with it, and most of the 
stuff here is of a similar function, then maybe the Websphere stuff may help 
us, or am I barking up the wrong tree? Isn't it a GUI sort of thing? I don't 
know much about it, neither does my mate here, we would both love to know more 
and start using it. Where do we start with that?

Steve