Re: AS/400 vs. IBM i

I am sorry you carry this AS/400 burden. Those of us who are far younger will continue to run the incredible IBM i on Power Systems far into the future.

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.Frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com - Personal Development IBM i timeshare service.
www.iInTheCloud.com - Commercial IBM i Cloud Hosting.

On 10/23/2019 7:41 PM, Patrik Schindler wrote:

Hello Roger,

Am 23.10.2019 um 23:41 schrieb Roger Harman <roger.harman@xxxxxxxxxxx>:

And, I'll add that it is not the *name* that is the issue... it's the PERCEPTION.

And why is that so?

I got the impression that a shell window with scrolling text (like somtimes shown in movies) is perceived geeky and cool and obviously current tech, because, hey it's shown in that new movie!

Whereas the AS/400 and it's successors are perceived as ultimately boring. It is a classical high priced business system, mostly running stuff considered boring (by geeks). Commercial IT at it's best: Warehouse management, personnel administration, tracking account movements, to name a few. Stuff that makes sure civilisation as we know it won't collapse, because money stops flowing, carriage of goods ceases, personnel isn't directed to where needed.

At least that's what I could summarize from asking colleagues (this must be replaced by an ESX with 20 Windows VMs!) or other people in the IT realm: Customers, maybe friends of friends, like that.

A few weeks ago, I introduced a good friend of mine to the system, showed him some things, helped him to get started and how to do user tasks, explained to him how PF, DSPF and PGM/CMD are related. At first he was reluctant but as he gained experience, he became aware how extraordinarily good engineered the whole system is and how little effort is necessary to create a small PF maintenance application from scratch. Especially when comparing it to doing the same from scratch with just a LAMP stack.

Most sysadmins (of common platforms) know about Windows and certain applications, and at least heard of Macs and Linux. The AS/400 is mostly invisible. If the company has one, there's one often short-before-retirement guy who's managing it. (Maybe another reason: The guy is old, so the whole stuff he's using must be also.) If the company doesn't have one, maybe the admin(s) have heard the term AS/400 more or less long time ago. Since there was no update on that, most think like, ah, this has to be old technology, because I never heard of that again. Thanks IBM, because they renamed the stuff to make it appear fresh, they moved it out of common perception. Maybe even IBM is considered outdated and obsolete by some of these guys?

And, if one person has come to the conclusion that this is old stuff, by chance he's telling that to colleagues on an occasion. They're telling it to friends which post it on online platforms when the discussion revolves around IBM and so, for years, rumor spreads and IBM does nothing to counterfeit this perception. High prices, high maintenance costs, twenty different calculation outcomes which platform gives the best ROI depending on which computer company calculates it, and more fun just add up to keep the installed base low.

I admit that my view is very biased towards character based interfaces, but it seems "modern" applications are mostly web-based and often based at least in parts on Java code.

So allow me the heresy to ask the rhetorical question: Why should I now buy a system which is rare to find in the wild, extraordinarily expensive, uncommon to administrate, finding less real-world problem solutions in the Internet when I can have the same functionality with Linux-VMs running on redundant ESX servers on redundant storage for less investment and a lot less maintenance costs? LAMP is very famous. So famous that IBM build a DB2-Storage-Backend for MySQL, so a lot of PHP stuff can run in PASE. Plus, Linux is very common nowadays. It's really easy to find help, compared to our beloved midrange systems.

Seems, that my perception of i's real strength is interesting for just a tiny niche of possible users.

Maybe Jack is right about keeping the ship sailing until the last one turns off the lights? Maybe it's really about just trying to keep the old stuff running until we all are dead and nobody knows how to maintain the applications or systems anymore and than they will get replaced, with an awful lot of hassle and money.

Concluding: You can't change perception of people by putting a new name sticker on it. "IBM what? Ah, AS/400! Now, I know. Yes, heard of that, isn't that this outdated pricey stuff nobody knows how it's really working? Should be replaced with proper Windows servers, I think. At least we know how to cope with these and they're certainly newer than this AS/400-stuff…"

But this is my personal perception, in southern Germany, as an employee of a classical computer service company for small to medium sized companies. I don't claim my view as an universal truth.

:wq! PoC

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