The IBM'ers have said to me that there are no plans to discontinue the
iSereies (formally AS400) and that the consensus at IBM is that they can't
imagine such a thing.  BTW, I'm doing a migration talk at HP World on
migrating MPE applications to Linux and Windows.  My demo machine will be an
iSeries that will be running Linux in a partition and Window on a board
inside of the same machine!  As an extra added attraction we will be
demonstrating the same MPE COBOL, VPLUS, IMAGE  application running on
Linux, Windows and the iSeries!

Since running these different OS's is possible, if the iSeries ceases to be
popular enough IBM can reduce the size of its dedicated OS staff and reduce
development on that OS.  They are now and have been integrating it with
Windows, Linux and AIX all along.  It could still be sold and supported by
IBM for 20-30 years after that and they could still profit from it.  It's a
different set of economics than the HP 3000.

People who think they can project the future of the iSeries from what
happened to the HP 3000 should do a small amount of research and see how
much more than the HP 3000 it really is.  I would suggest starting with the
substantial resources that are available on the Web.  Some friends and I had
the same questions, I approached IBM and they held a two day briefing for us
at their Executive Briefing Center in Rochester, Minn.   There were
approximately 29 of us in attendance.  We were impressed.  Who knows, they
might be willing to do that again if enough people are interested.

One key difference between the iSeries and the HP 3000 are the number of
commecial applications available on the platform.  There are hundreds of
applicaions with large installed bases.  It seems unlikely that IBM would
abandon that major asset.  It is more likely that they would use it to keep
the customers.

I can't speak for IBM, however, a reasonable scenario for the iSeries would
be to continue to make it as interoperable and indistinguishable from the
other platforms as possible in the things that the other platforms are good
at.  These things include JAVA, e-commerce, Web application services, etc.
It already is superior to those platforms in aspects that make it unique.
If you study the platform you will find that it comes with DB2 "bundled", it
has an enviable JAVA implemetation, there an IBM supported APACHE  web
server, there is the Websphere application server and the list goes on an
on.

Charles Finley
Transformix Computer Corporation

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Woods [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, July 18, 2002 11:44 PM
To: [log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask]
Subject: RE: [HP3000-L] Migrating from MPE to AS400



Charles Finley wrote [in part]:
>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.

Well that sounds a lot like the MPE I remember fondly!
--
Jeff Woods
[log in to unmask]
[log in to unmask]
Quintessential School Systems
"Why oh why isn't IA-64 Linux big-endian?!"

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