Re: power line (AS/400) article in computerworld

[Bruce Vining <bvining@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Steve,
   
  > IBM i has not been fundementally improved for the last 10 yrs.
   
  What do you consider to be a "fundamental improvement"?  LPAR for instance was 1999, I believe (though I admit I'm a bit shaky on this one) IASP was 1999, PASE was 2000,...  Database support for BLOB, CLOB, datalinks, UDF,etc is in the last ten years, ... The 8-byte pointer support (again a little shaky on this) in 2004...
   
  Bruce
   
  PS - I admit to being in somewhat a foul mood this afternoon.  When I left the Wisconsin User Conference this morning I had at least glanced through all my mail.  Upon my return to Rochester I found over 100 new e-mails, all too many of which had this subject line and a continuation of a discussion I have seen too many time (in my opinion) on this list.  Product requirements really need to be fed into IBM using DCRs, COMMON requirement requests, and the like.

Steve Richter <stephenrichter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
  On 4/11/08, Bruce Vining wrote:
> Steve,
>
> In light of some of the notes that fly when you post on 16MB spaces and 10 character names, have you considered prefacing your wishes with:
>
> " I realize that i5/OS with the terapace storage and data models supports storage addressing simliar to other systems -- for instance memory allocations of up to 2GB, the use of 8-byte integers as pointer values, etc; that the IFS supports file/object names similiar to other systems -- for instance a file name such as '/ThisIsAFairlyLongNameWithALongExtension.ThoughPerhapsNotTooLong'; that a given job (or even a careful individual program) can utilize both teraspace and single level storage concurrently, etc. but I would like to see IBM extend the traditional Single Leval Store and library system (which is admittedly unique to this platform) to also incorporate the capabilities of i5/OS teraspace and IFS. This would represent an architectural capability far beyond other platforms and help negate criticism in the marketplace."
>
> Just a proposal.

it is a fine proposal and that is what I have been trying to say all
along. just to be realistic, no one had to tell the hardware
designers at IBM how and why to build the world class POWER6 systems.
the genius software engineers who created the S/38 did what they did
on their initiative. IBM i has not been fundementally improved for the
last 10 yrs. IBM will not open source the OS. Either they improve it
or the capabilities of this most excellent of hardware platforms will
be wasted.

-Steve