Re: IBM Hardware direction

In Feb 1, 2008 6:55 PM, Aaron Bartell <albartell@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

With all the virtualization stuff going on, would anybody be surprised if
they were able to run i5/OS on a PC in 5 years? I am asking out of near
total ignorance of low-level OSes running on certain chips.

Thanks to TIMI, porting i5/OS is rather easy, and you'll STILL be able
to run your S/36 apps ;)

However, Virtualization and porting different operating systems are
completely different things.

There were emulators available that made it possible to run PPC Mac OS
X Versions on a x86 Machine (IIRC the name was PearPC). The same is
definitively possible for i5/OS, but there is not much interest to do
that - and it would be a lot more work than a PPC Emulator.

Nevertheless, i think providing a "free" x86 version of i5/OS would do
wonders for the platform. But it ain't going to happen. Not now, not
in the next two years. I'm willing to bet 500 CHF on that ;)

IBM needs exclusivity to charge it's outragous hardware prices in the
System i sector.