Re: Add F8 to your F9

Hello Jack,

can't resist anymore. :-)

My posting was about the fatuity of pushing IBM to invest 10 more seconds
in tarting up the green screen as opposed to deploying their limited human
resources in tasks more likely to keep the platform viable for a few more
years.

From what I see, IBM is porting more and more Open Source stuff to PASE. IBM i seems to strengthen PASE and leave CPF alone. With every new OSS tool, the chance of exploitable bugs will increase. I'm glad to see IBM actually recognizes the importance of CPF for some of us.

Maybe I'm mostly alone with my opinion but I think one of the greatest strengths IBM i has *is* the green screen. Imagine a DSPF with a few fields, a PF for data storage and a tiny (!) RPG program for jumping back and forth between records. Now try to accomplish the same with Libcurses in Linux or another UNIX. It's a cumbersome mess. I tried (for hobbyist purposes) and finally gave up after months of frustration.

I'm working and partly programming with(in) Linux since about 1995 and saved an 150 from being dumped about 2008, just for curiosity and satisfying my retrocomputing hobby. I'm still very attached to Linux for server purposes, but when it comes to create tiny tools which provide full-screen user interaction, nothing can beat the combination of PF/DSPF/RPGLE, for the sheer easiness of actually having a functioning solution ready in a comparable small amount of time.

I read a lot about the urge for modernization in old MCPRESS articles and other old and newer sources. While having a truly graphical UI may be beneficial when there are actual graphics to show (product pictures come to mind), I really like character based UIs where appropriate. It's just feeling much more responsive then waiting for the local browser to render eye candy just for the sake of eye candy. Watching users typing just characters and instead of pressing return, using the mouse to hover to "OK" makes me wince. Of those many people I worked with, after showing them they can press return instead of moving the mouse and click, most of them were happy to be shown. Today, employees are expected to be able to use a computer. Most of them aren't skilled but employers nevertheless think they can save training costs.

If you take away 5250 and CPF from IBM i, what does remain? I think, it'd be just another UNIX-like server platform with a lot of legacy code to map the classical UNIX *STMF and memory handling into the single level store.

To stay a viable platform, IBM needs to attract young people who maybe learn to like the platform. The z-Guys have realized that. I'm not alone in my wishing IBM would give away i hobbyist licenses for free which DEC already did with VMS. HPE still continues this offer today.
To stay a viable platform, IBM should rethink their pricing. If a small startup is billed 10k a year just for OS licensing, no wonder IBM i is all about old stuff. Old code, old applications in old shops, doing their duty, touched only if unavoidable. Migration? Too costly. Continuing? Also costly but at least we know that the box just runs.
I heard from an IBM sales guy in Germany that there's literally no new code for IBM i. He was very astonished to hear that I'm developing new code, in RPGLE. Nothing big, but small tools which make sense in character based displays and the CPF environment. It's way faster to create a database table maintenance tool in 5250 than with the ubiquitous LAMP stack on Linux for running in a Browser. I don't need no fancy clickable UI for management of customer's Cisco routers, as an actual example.

Consequently, I wonder why nobody took this development approach, with easily createable database tables, easily createable screens, easily writeable code to fill them with life to a common platform. Maybe because IBM lawyers will eventually find ways to sue one to death. :-)

No one wants character based displays? Wrong. Linux Sysadmins prefer command line. Experienced users also use the command line for some tasks on macOS and Windows. (net use is so much faster than clicking me to death to manually map a drive) Most users I was working with are willing to learn character based applications when show that these usually feel much more responsive than browser based database utilities.

GUIs provide more screen space? Partly true, until the OS vendor decides that thicker window decorations are fancier. And, look at some GUI database applications. A whole screen loaded with textual and tabular information, crowded and confusing, because someone thought it's good if every piece of information loosely related to the main function of the display is shown concurrently. Text displays can also be a relief, because devs have to *think* which information needs to be displayed immediately and which can be omitted until that piece is explicitly requested.

My intention isn't to offend you or piss you off. Your initial comment about "modernize or die" was just too tempting to show you that there is more than just patch browser access to old apps and they'd be ready for the next 30 years to come. :-)

:wq! PoC

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