SAA Historical perspective

["Jon Paris" <Jon.Paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 >> Weren't the mainframers proponents?

Not exactly.  They were the ones who (by virtue of their license fee
revenue) had the bucks to spend.  While they appeared to be leading the
effort on the surface, they were only truly interested as long as everything
in SAA worked the way their systems worked!!  (AD/Cycle was a similar
situation)  Since in terms of native capability (as opposed to add-ons) the
mainframes significantly lagged behind OS/400, the SAA standard had to be
dumbed-down to accommodate what they could do.  That in turn rendered it
useless for OS/400 users.

As Hans said though - there were many good things that came out of it.  The
existence of the SAA RPG compiler was an essential factor in getting funding
for RPG IV.  In my opinion we would _never_ have got the funding for a
completely new compiler.  The Code/400 verifiers and VARPG were an added
bonus.

In many ways 400 developers got a lot more out of SAA than those on any
other platform!!

Jon Paris
Partner400