Re: Cloud and the future of IBM i

Calvin,

Funny you should mention e-waste, as that was how I acquired my first
system. Somewhere in the archives of this list are my adventures with
failing SCSI disks and eventually figuring out how to overwrite the
encrypted QSECOFR password with a known value taken from another system.
Unfortunately, the rest of the hardware died piece by piece before I was
able to play around with it much. It had tons of dev tools on it.

I'm left with a 9406-800, an 8203-E4A, and the 70-day trial, which is kind
of useless because sometimes I go weeks without time for personal projects.

Jim


On Fri, Mar 6, 2020 at 6:13 PM Calvin Buckley <calvin@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Speaking as someone who got into IBM i from a hobbyist perspective (but
did more about it)...

Part of the problem is if you're interested in i (which in itself is
not easy to hard) is the barrier to entry is *very* hard. As of now,
the easiest way to get your hands on e-waste systems (which usually run
the gamut from 9406-150s to 8203-E4As) and use the free trial of i (or
hope you have LICKEYs...). Unfortunately, if you managed to figure out
how to install it (which can actually be quite tricky for first-time
users, especially considering when I'd say most users don't even
install it themelves), you're stuck with a 70 day demo and very little
guidance on how to use it.

Why e-waste, when it's actual HW with no support? Unfortunately, the
cloud options are priced for exactly their target audience - enterprise
customers. Look at the prices for say, i on Google Cloud if you don't
believe me. If you're interested in dabbling with i, to see if you
could do it as a career, mere interest, or even learning as a poor
student, then i as a service is not priced for indiviuals, let alone
"starving hackers". (Having the hardware might be interesting to also
let you gain experience in that part, but not everyone might want to
deal with that. And I'm excluding new hardware because that is
obviously priced towards current i users in enterprise.)

Worse still is the utter lack of support - it's not just having to make
the most of the free trial, it's the confusion I've seen towards
hobbyists and even people interested in learning i as indiviuals on
sites like Midrange. For the hobbyists, Midrange often dismisses them
by wondering why anyone would want to use it for pleasure, and for the
indiviual learners (anyone from poor students to unemployed seeking
retraining), they don't understand that the pricing for a lot of
training materials is out of budget for many, especially with the free
resources elsewhere. (It seems it's actually easier to get into IBM i
by being forced into it, rather than actually wanting to.)

I think reasonably priced cloud offerings (sub-P05 class?) would be
useful for many classes of hobbyist, but not all; the ones who acquired
hardware could make great technicans someday. IME, hobbyists drive a
*lot* of the effort on other platforms, despite their small size, so I
think it'd be worth for IBM to support them similarily to how DEC/HP
has supported VMS hobbyists. For example, if it wasn't for my hobbyist
friends, I wouldn't be here at all, and without me, many of the open
source source things available for i.

(As for why I got into it? The computer science research angle, which I
find it makes a good source of inspiration and precedent. Turns out I
got the hang of how to use it for practical things though, and do
useful and impressive things with it.)

On Fri, 2020-03-06 at 09:21 -0500, Jim wrote:

Although I mostly lurk here, and play around with obsolete hardware

some, I

have some thoughts I'd like to share with the group.

It seems that much of the success of the Linux and Windows world is the
fact that people can just download stuff and start playing with it on

their

own. It's what they're exposed to, sometimes from a very young age. You
couldn't really do this with IBM i, as one wasn't able to walk into Best
Buy and obtain hardware capable of running it even if it was freely
downloadable.

Even as an outsider, I probably could write a book about what IBM

*should*

have done with Power Architecture, and IBM i. The past is the past,

though.

So what about cloud? Is IBM using, or planning to, use this as a method

of

attracting new interest to the platform? Are there third-parties offering
tools or access to cloud hosted environments for learning and
experimentation? Or is it more of the same - nothing freely available,

one

must pay hundreds of dollars for tools or access in order to play around
with it?

--
This is the Midrange Systems Technical Discussion (MIDRANGE-L) mailing list
To post a message email: MIDRANGE-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change list options,
visit: https://lists.midrange.com/mailman/listinfo/midrange-l
or email: MIDRANGE-L-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Before posting, please take a moment to review the archives
at https://archive.midrange.com/midrange-l.

Please contact support@xxxxxxxxxxxx for any subscription related
questions.

Help support midrange.com by shopping at amazon.com with our affiliate
link: https://amazon.midrange.com