Re: Moving forward or backward...

[Pete Helgren <Pete@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Amazing!

I used to work for a software company that developed and marketed a 
school district administration application on the S/34 (and S/36, 
S/38,AS/400, etc) It was even an IBM licensed program for a while (while 
IBM still had vision and had an industry focus on education).  Anyway, 
you folks probably know what happened:  Microsoft and Apple sold the 
"benefits" of their applications by moving to a per-school model rather 
than a school district wide.  Immediately there were issues with 
consolidated reporting but the MS/Apple solution was "better" because it 
wasn't "green screen".

So for those folks who have held on to the system over the years, there 
will be a single i running the administration applications next to racks 
and racks of servers handling web serving and instructional applications 
(better!).  Geez, if IBM had just solved the GUI issue on i earlier, 
they would be perfectly poised for this new emphasis on "simplification" 
(currently achieved by multiple servers appearing as a single resource: 
cloud).

It isn't too late.  IT environments, particularly those workloads in 
school districts, are getting so complex as to be nearly unmanageable.  
There is still an opportunity for an i to play a leading role here.  I 
know that at least Nathan is banking on it!

Pete


Mike Cunningham wrote:
> http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2010/feb10/02-24WMSLaunchPR.mspx
>
> Guess they were afraid to call it a "mainframe" but this really is going back to the days of the VT-100 dump-terminal on the user's desk with all the processing occurring in one place. Not even thin client that does processing at the desktop or even 5250 that did some processing at the desktop.
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