System i Addict

Not that he wanted any new fans? I did a Google for “Chris Hird Fan Club”+ iSeries, and got back nothing. Google must be broken?

link to the Article Chris Hird wrote for System iNetwork

While Chris and I have been on the AS/400 the same amount of time, it appears that Chris has spent his time a little better, in that he has created a few applications, which I would love to do and am learning now in college, but have not done yet. While I truly agree with Chris and know that in order for the System i5 to survive it needs to innovate and do the same things that the other platforms out there are doing. It needs to be proficient in Java and C. For the record the i5 has been doing C and Java for some time and if you want great Java support the i5 is the only way to go. 64 Bit Java is much faster then anything Sun offers.

I have long struggled with the idea that it has a language that is not native to other platforms. Although it’s not something I can speak to, but I understand the ramifications of the RPG language. I would have to add that FREE/RPG is a step in the right direction, but would it not just make sense to just dump RPG for a better tool like C/Java/PHP?

IBM keeps replacing directors and moving energetic people in and out of the i5 group and the sales still slump. The i5 fans all cry about not having a Super Bowl Ad, but is that really the problem or just a bunch of people winning about something that is more a symptom than the cause of the problem.

For the first time in a long time I have been faced with a director that does not see the value of the i5, and for the first time in a long time I understand the other side of the fences argument. The i5 is expensive and it’s considered “old technology” and why would it be still considered “old” when it has the best hardware under it and in my opinion the most stable and un-hackable OSes on the market?

How can IBM and the i5 team be missing that the old comes from RPG and the fact that we have to hire old people in there late 40s-60s to program in RPG? There are very few 20 and 30 something RPG programmers? There are plenty of C and Java kids to go around? I use the term “kids”in jest. I envy those of you who know C and Java and are young and smart.

“IBM recently announced the new 515 and 525 boxes that really bring the cost of the hardware and software down, but unless we reduce the cost of development, we will never see the i5 rising to the top. We don’t need RPG courses to be run at colleges or universities; the i5 supports other languages as well. Let’s have those colleges and universities run courses for developing in other languages on the i5, showing just how easy it is to use Java, C, C++, and so forth.” -Chris Hird

This is the paragraph in the whole artilce that wraps it up and makes the most sense. I can take the last 17 years and do nothing with it if I want, or I can make some sense of it and Chris has done just this with this paragraph. Colleges all ready teach C and Java. I am going to a small community college in Northern Colordado called AIMs and they offer both. Would it not be really cool to have one of those 515s (without the stupid limit link1, link2 , link3) to compile my C on an run my Java on rather than Windows of Linux?

This problem also kind of point back to the failure of the Front Range IBM Users Group….some may think this is a stretch, but they dies because all they wanted to talk about was RPG and other items like that, they never ventured into the new and exciting stuff, hence they died.

While I can’t wrap this topic up today I can say Chris hit the nail on the head. I propose that he and I run the i5 division and help turn it around because while the last few people in there have been nice talkers they were more politicians than innovators and crippled the i5 from being what it should in the market. Shame on Dr. Frank Soltis too for not stopping this maddness years ago, the father of the AS/400 should have done what is right for his super star child and migrated away from RPG years ago.

I would take the gloves of and fight like no tomorrow. The System i5 would become the system you wanted to work on in college because of the speed and agility of the system, students would say I had to compile on a Linux box (bummer voice), while my friend at “Name a better College” was compiling on i5 and it was so much better. They would come out of college looking for the i5 and then would become managers and would want to run more apps on the i5 and less on windows and other crap like that….

That is all for now. I think Chris is “spot on” to use a British phrase and sure hope he is coming to COMMON 2007 so we can start the new fan club.