RE: Happy Birthday to the AS/400, iSeries, System i, IBM i -- MIDRANGE-L

Those who paid careful attention to what Dr. Frank did and didn't say this morning may have noticed that he did not talk about the future of "S/38 - AS/400 - iSeries - System i - i" at all. He merely talked about the future of POWER and programming changes needed to exploit that technology.

He made no mention at all of any future enhancements to follow "i 6.1.0" in "i 6.2.0" or "i 7.1.0" however I'm sure they will all be posted soon on an IBM web site somewhere. Probably right next to the page that clearly explains to customers and prospects why "i" is better for their business than AIX/Linux/Windows and why they should choose it.

Neil Palmer, Cambridge, Ontario, Canada

(This account not monitored for personal mail,
remove the last two letters before @ for that)

--- On Thu, 6/19/08, Jerry Adams <Jerry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

From: Jerry Adams <Jerry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: RE: Happy Birthday to the AS/400, iSeries, System i, IBM i
To: "Midrange Systems Technical Discussion" <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Received: Thursday, June 19, 2008, 3:50 PM
Dr. Frank didn't address "maintenance levels"
in today's webinar, but he did say that Power 7 was due
in 2010. Doesn't sound like they're giving up. In
fact, based upon past history (my major at UT), they're
probably already working on Power 8 and, even, 9.

He, also, talked about the new supercomputer at Los Alamos
(someone posted a link to an article this week) and its
basic (but still over my head) architecture and how it
relates to the i. Again, doesn't sound like
retrenchment to me. I don't know "who" the
trade media are, but it may be that, while reading some
financials, they may have simply seen reduced costs and
translated that into "maintenance" while it *may*
simply mean "doing more with less." I don't
have any facts; just speculation of various possible
scenarios.

What I found especially interesting was his discussion of
chip density (make it smaller to make it faster) and how
that limitation (small size) has probably been reached. As
well as the diminishing returns of threads on processing
speeds; doubling the number of threads does *not* double
the speed. After either 32 or 64 threads (hope I got that
right; I wasn't taking notes) there is little or no
improvement, but the complexity of managing those threads
increases as you add more, which means changes
(enhancements) to all languages, including RPG and COBOL -
but because of the i's architecture (aka: Planning
Ahead) even 36 environment programs will be able to
continue running - without re-compiling.

A trivia bit he threw in was that PASE originally stood for
Private Address Space Environment; marketing changed it to
Portable Applications Solution Environment.

Jerry C. Adams
IBM System i Programmer/Analyst
B&W Wholesale
office: 615-995-7024
email: jerry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Steve
Richter
Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2008 12:58 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Happy Birthday to the AS/400, iSeries, System
i, IBM i

On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 9:43 AM, Anne Lucas
<alucas@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm two days behind in reading midrange-l....just

read a post (6/17)

with a comment about the birthday celebrating the

"name" AS/400.

It's the technology, how it has evolved, and what

it has become that we

celebrate! It is the product and it's

capabilities that we celebrate.

Not the name!

There will be a celebration in Rochester and the

appropriate IBM AS/400

thru IBM i executives will be on hand to help

celebrate.

if recent reports in the trade media that R&D on the
core OS has been
reduced by IBM to maintenance levels, that dampers the
celebration for
me. I think the new hardware is great and cant wait for my
BCS JS12
order to be shipped. I hope at the celebration there will
be
announcements of the features planned for V6R2 and when to
expect its
release.

Will G Glenn Henry be recognized as the person who created
the
software and MI side of the system? ( Dr Frank, I
understand, gets
credit for the SLS )

-Steve
--

__________________________________________________________________
Looking for the perfect gift? Give the gift of Flickr!

http://www.flickr.com/gift/