Bryan NG Asks:

>Is AS400 and MPE are proprietary operating system?

[chf]The iSeries is an operating system with an installed base of over
400,000 machines that is growing.  There are more commercial applications
available on the iSeries than any other computing platform.  It scales from
a very small system to systems that proportedly handle 5,000 users + beyond
believe, comes with vendor supported, JAVA, e-commerce enablement,
industrial strength reliability, batch job processing, spooling, etc.  It
has two native enviroments one is the traditional one and another is a
UNIX/POSIX(AIX) compatible one.  It come standard with the DB2 RDBMS (the
number one selling one in the world).

Moreover, you can run Linux in partitions on the computer and you can add in
Windows (proprietary) processor boards.  Therefore, on the same platform you
can have an enterprise wide-bus speed network.  Some people at IBM are
saying that in the next year or so, they will allow you to purchase an
iSeries with AIX in a partition.

The division that sells it supports it in ways that are almost
incomprehensible.  The keep making it better.

It is unique and proprietary and that's a good thing.  There's nothing like
it.


>If it is affirmative, will AS400 be end of support soon?

[chf]If you owned it why on earth would you discontinue it?  I think the
most likely sceinario is that people who want to leave OS/400 will start
running it's replacement in a partition on an iSeries and gradually
transition.  IBM has absolutely no incentive to kill it.  If it dies, it
will die a natural death. However, please bear in mind that it has almost a
fanatical following amoung those who know and use the machine.

Charles Finley

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