Re: RPG on HP MPE systems

Jack, I hope you don't take from my statement that I'm disparaging either OS/2 or EGL.  They were both fantastic achievements.  When we built the very first commercial client/server applications for IBM midrange systems we built it entirely on OS/2 and those machines always worked, and this was back in the 90s.  And to this day I still consider EGL to be the best 4GL ever designed.  It's the only truly platform-agnostic business language, and it bridged the gap between objects and records seamlessly.  The fact that you could define an EGL record that you could pass directly to RPG on one end and use to build a an HTML table on the other end seamlessly; that was as close to magic as I've ever seen.  Except maybe SEPs.  SEPs are the Michael Jordan of programming.

What I was saying is that IBM is the grand champion of creating the best tools in the world and then killing them off, usually because they can't figure out how to monetize them in a way that the pointy-haired bosses can relate to (i.e., not enough services).

But I'm not bitter.  Nope, not me.


On 5/22/2020 3:33 PM, Jack Woehr wrote:

On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 12:13 PM Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On 5/22/2020 3:51 AM, Patrik Schindler wrote:


And now that I think of it, large chunks of my career over the years
have been spent on obsolete technologies. They just weren't obsolete at
the time. OS/2 and EGL come immediately to mind.

Thanks, IBM.

Yes, IBM is to be thanked. OS/2 was lovely, and Windows NT couldn't have
been written if they hadn't tried OS/2 first.

OS/2 had a perfect TCP/IP stack in 1994. Windows NT didn't have a truly
functional TCP/IP stack until Windows 2000.

IBM's business model has always been based on "at the forefront with what
they have to have now and will pay the big bux for".

That's why IBM are to this day *one of the greatest, if not THE greatest,
commercial R&D firms on the planet*.

If you want to do something forward-looking from IBM , *get involved with
IBM Quantum Experience*.

My practice is legacy system support. My heart is in Quantum Computing.

Jack Woehr
Qiskit Advocate
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IBM Quantum Challenge 2020 Achievement
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