> I think the z people are jealous of the i people. The i system is totally > closed up. You don't have any idea how the OS works. 99% of it is "Licensed > Internal Code". From what I've read in some books on it, by the original > architect, this LIC is written in C++ and executes on the Power CPU (the i > hardware is basically the same as the p, with some modifications and the LIC > installed in it). IBM totally rules on that box. It would be like the z only > being able to run user code written in COBOL.
Well... The S/390 had two strikes against it: 1) A Published "Principles of Operation", and 2) FIPS compatibility requirements. The S/38 which evolved into the AS/400 which begat the iSeries was an... odd beastie. I was told by a developer at Thoroughbred when there was an effort to put their Business BASIC onto the AS/400 given the existence of a "C" compiler the discovery that a character pointer (well, all address pointers) were approximately 88 bytes in length kind of put paid to that idea. (shrugs) And, for the longest time, the "best" language for the S/38--AS/400--iSeries was (shudders) RPG (the Repugnant Programmer Generator). One wag joked that it was the "assembler language" for that box. I suspect that the iSeries internals-- above the PowerPC-- would make the Burrough B6700+ architecture look positively comprehensible. (From the B6700 Field Engineer's Handbook, the instruction "Interrupt Other Processors" has the mnemonic "HEYU".) -soup -- John R. Campbell Speaker to Machines souperb at gmail dot com MacOS X proved it was easier to make Unix user-friendly than to fix Windows ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
