Well said, Justin
-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Justin Dearing
Sent: Friday, May 29, 2015 10:50 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Free/Cheap Midrange access?
On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 12:25 PM, Michael Ryan <michaelrtr@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Sometimes. But I don't think the decline of the IBM midrange platform
is due to people not being able to develop A/R programs in their
basement for fun.
I'd argue the opposite. In todays world hobbyist development is a large part of what people chose to pursue. I'm a 34 year old college drop out that happened to fall into AS/400 operations at the beginning of my career.
I actively pursued unix administration specifically because I could hone those skills in my parents basement as a kid.
The person that introduced me to the iSeries also left school (but when back when his on kids were college age). He got a job in a bank printing checks, hung out with the operators, and worked his way up. That path is hard to come by today. More shops outsource their operations staff. WIndows and unix hardware is cheaper and smaller, and you can provision cloud slices in minutes with a credit card. As a developer, I often get to chose the platform I write greenfield apps for, OS, language, and database.I choose the things I use at home on the weekends.
Look at Microsoft recent announcements. The new .NET is open source, and its targeted at both the server and embedded markets. There is a new Nano version of their server OS that has a super small footprint, and will run on ARM devices. They are converging their hobby and enterprise markets.
My biggest frustration on the IBMi is I can't buy a $5 a month LPAR or buy used hardware for under $500 that will run V7 (actually I didn't pursue that avenue yet, because of wife acceptance factor). On top of that user group meeting in my area cost over $50 compared with local PHP, .NET, Sql Server, etc groups which are free. Yes its a sit down dinner versus pizza.
Yes the demographics are older and better paid at the midrange meetings.
Yes $65 a month for networking and education is on par with other professional organizations. That being said, you need to target the young riff raff that don't have $65 a month for a sitn down dinner meeting, don't have an employer that will train them, but are motivated to learn on their own.
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