Re: Why IBMi research effort

On 8/31/2012 9:45 PM, DrFranken wrote:

Mark,

It sounds to me like you are a very talented and inquisitive young
man. I for one can appreciate the concept of hanging probes and
connecting wires to your old system attempting to figure things out on
your own. I too own DMMs and VOMs, and ociliscopes, and various probes
and tools. The hardware guys put out extra security when I get near the
hardware booth at COMMON or other shows. I've had a lot of success
learning and testing and trying. I've hooked 45 drives to a model 170.
I've built a model 270 that was 7 ft tall. I've hung external stuff all
over my lab machines. But I do it to show to people how reliable the
machine is, to explain that as tested and supported it truly is a rock
solid machine and that even pushing twisting and expanding it still runs
great. It is over-built to be reliable.

The problem with my system is that there are various issues with system password, license keys, etc. I have found various "workarounds" that I dare not speak too much about publicly lest IBM close the holes. But I can use my system for what I want to do, learning the deep systems end of an i, I can get at PDM and I can develop against DB2 on i without using a VPN to the office.

If I may be allowed to interpret your comments you want to be able
to tweek the bits. To touch the innards. To root about in the internals.
Sad to say IBM i may not be the operating system for you. IBM has
intentionally blocked such things in order to enable that rock solid
reliability, that work class secure-ability, that ability to run a
program from 20 or more years ago unchanged and run it on the very
smallest or the vary largest machine completely unchanged. At the same
time it also supports the many virtualization capabilities you
mentioned, it supports PHP and apache and CGI and Java. I do not
understand the issues you mention with Java or PHP. I have installed PHP
25 times and it has worked first time nearly every time. I have dozens
of customers running gobs and piles of Java up to and including
extremely large SAP implementation.

What I meant by that is that the licensing, hardware, etc. We're talking disk, memory, and software licensing costs are all significantly more expensive than pc server counterparts. Wasting any of that capacity on php, java or anything that doesn't "require" an IBM i means you bought too much excess capacity and probably paid a lot more than the equivalent linux power. Therefore, the most financially sound decision is to buy the smallest i possible and run all that "commodity" work on commodity machines. It seems pretty slow at the PASE stuff anyway.

SAP I can understand but SAP doesn't really use the system DB anyway.

I understand that you can do literally almost anything on an i. The question is why you would want to spend those cpu cycles and memory on something you can do for much cheaper on a linux box.

You mention TN5250 being phased out. I wonder where you get that
from? Sure Twinax is gone but that was a 1960s legacy connectivity and
while a single mile long cable supporting 7 devices was pretty cool in
it's day it's simply not a usable choice today. Today we connect
Ethernet to everything it's simpler, faster, cheaper, and more reliable.
And yes it supports TN5250 and does so at a blinding speed. IBM
Supports TN5250 on most platforms and other vendors support it on nearly
everything.

I read in other responses to this thread that IBM rubs your nose in it if you're still using the green screen. I think the general feeling is that the green screen makes the system feel old. If you have a more open mind though, the green screen is the greatest asset. The local echo makes it run great over high latency links. The text only nature makes it run great over slow links. The green screen fits very well with satellite and cell phone internet connections.

You point out "a million ways to do things' which is what happens
when a system is still viable 35 years after it's introduction.
Maintaining backward compatibility (something the Windows guys don't
even know the definition of) means there will be a lot of options. But
just because they are there doesn't mean you have to use them. Use the
modern options, pick what works. There is no need to be a guru on every
possible component.

I do realize that that is why. But again, like I said this is great for the customer. Not so great for an ISV who wants to stay in business. It's nice that all the functionality is there but it does make it complicated for a new user.

True the hobbyist value is small. If you truly want to learn about
the current versions of the system check out my offering at
www.iDevCloud.com. There you'll be on the current version rather than a
version released 6 1/2 years ago (about a century in computer years!)

I'll check that out. I recently got an account on some german server, rzkh.de or something along those lines. Not too shabby for free ;)

You claim IBM i is complicated for the sake of being complicated. I
don't see that at all. I see elegance and logic. Built in layers to
isolate the hardware bits from the software and operating system while
leveraging the hardware at the same time.

I wish I had an example of this but I'm afraid I'm wrong. IBM developed i without the influence of other systems so everything is different period. Not really for the sake of it. Still this doesn't help new adoption.

I'm curious about all those failures in the logs. Are they truly
failures (remember you've been sticking probes in the old gal) or are
they noticies, observations and such. Every look at the logs in Linux or
Windows? I suggest you won't find them devoid of any mystery errors! Yo
also comment that the error codes are mysterious and must be searched
for to determine their meaning. Perhaps the codes themselves are a bit
less than obvious but every message has one! Many Many messages in
windows etc are just words so you get to search for text instead. Ill
take 7 characters every time!

Lots of HSL messages. I can't start an LPAR guest because of it. I'm afraid to break the system and it has licensing issues so I'm afraid to break too much because I can still boot it without sending $8K IBM's way. But in the past it's had many many disk failures, it has gone through 3 cdrom drives somehow and the tape drive currently in the box doesn't do anything.

Oh and the tape media is *insane* price wise. NAS over ethernet is a much more financially sane idea than working with those tapes.

Every system is different to be sure. IMHO all in all with
reliability capability expandability compatibility IBM i on POWER
compares favorably to every operating system on there in must respects.

You, I , and everyone here knows that i is a truly impressive system. Not only was it far ahead of it's time but it's STILL better than linux. The MI setup, job control, printing system, integrated DB, etc. I fear the situation for i is much like the situation for OS/2. Remember when IBM was advertising that? The commercials were like "oh wow, look at OS/2 it's so cool". Not even a slight mention to what it even is. Big surprise nobody bought it. Everyone who knows OS/2 knows it was an *amazing* technical masterpiece but IBM had such trouble actually conveying that to people. We know that IBM i is great, but nobody else really does and most people aren't technical enough to understand why it is better. They just think it's "old".

The trouble I think is that IBM wants to sell to companies. What they forget is that people work for companies. They need to care more about the people. They need to convey better the strengths of the system. That stuff is hidden very well and even veteran i admins in our company weren't able to convey to me WHY it is good. They always resort to saying oh it never crashes, saying it has single level store, and other things. Well I know it's only recent, but Linux never crashes too so that's not necessarily good enough anymore.

Of course I think about it as a consumer. To some international company, $85,000 for a server might and probably is literally nothing. Maybe I just have the wrong mindset, but I really feel like you need to hit consumers in a meaningful way if you want to have people who understand the system around to program it.

Thanks,
Mark