System iNetwork

I have to reply for a variety of reasons, most importantly my complete agreement with you that the one most significant change in the IBM culture is the absense of the SE and an actual "live" salesperson for most accounts that IBM serves. Some bean-counter back east has probably finally figured out the equation -- savings on SE minus lost business equals one REALLY BAD decision by some other bean counter or short-sited vision-less blue suit)!

I was fortunate to know a couple of great IBM SEs when first starting my career on this platform.

I stumbled into a job in a stock room (boxing up packages, bursting receipts and shipping stuff) back in graduate school. Next thing I know, the DP Manager sticks his head out the door of the computer room ... now keep in mind that up to this point, I had no idea what was really in that room other than every time the door opened, cold air came out and the noise level increased two-fold with a loud "hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm". I knew the the doors opened at time and someone called an "operator" shoved a bunch of printed papers at me and I did my job. But this day, Jay (that was his name) said, "hey, either of you guys want to be a system operator". I gave Dave the first chance and he said no, so ... I said .. sure, what's a system operator?

Anyway .. shortly after that I was babysitting printers on a Univac 90/40 and a brand new System/38. I got to know the IBM CE (he visited often) and started playing around with RPG programming on both systems in the middle of the night when some error popped up on the system. Heck .. why not try and fix this stuff? ... lol.

That was the beginning. I quickly fell in love with the System/38 and programming and never looked back.

Adrianne, our IBM SE on the account proved to be a lifesaver SO many times. He would research stuff, roll up his sleeves and help with a disk recovery, bring by a sandwich, stomach Chi-Chi's Mexican restaurant with me, and certainly was the primary reason our little business invested more and more in the platform over the years.

I guess we all wonder -- What WERE they thinking? ... when IBM began systematically eliminating those positions!

My arrival on the S/38 scene was by a somewhat different route.

Charged with establishing the "next strategic platform" for the University of Oregon's administrative applications (not the academic side), a colleague and I went to Digital (DEC, remember them?) and IBM as the leading system providers. DEC showed us the DECSystem-20, a beautiful, easy-to-use, fast system with a wealth of tools. IBM showed us the next version of the S/360 architecture. BUZZZ!

In a hurried attempt to salvage the account, the local IBMers lent us a S/38. Although the local IBMers didn't know what "capability-based addressing", "single-level storage", and all the other advanced S/38 architecture features were, I guess they figured it would appeal to academics.

It did! We delivered a report that recommended a system with a high-level, integrated architecture "like the IBM S/38".

Unfortunately, the pin-head U of O Provost insisted that "first-tier universities MUST have a mainframe". Arghhh!

He, of course, prevailed. But I left the university to help a variety of state agencies pull off the shared, central S/390, and install S/38s.

And from that point on, I've found the architecture to remain an exceptional base for growth and change.

From my perspective, the problem hasn't been IBM marketing. Instead, it's been critical failures to advance the language, tools, and UI technology in the same dramatic way that the S/38 advanced the system architecure.

IBM flinched each time a few people complained at COMMON, and COMMON itself failed to lead the community to the future we COULD have had with such a strong underlying platform.

Fixed-format RPG, SEU/PDM, and green-screen became a hard sell long before IBM did anything about these competitive deficiencies. We're still recovering.

Let's hope for the best -- it's a great system.

-- Paul Conte

Roger,

Thanks for the memories. I look forward to future postings.

When I started my first job I was fresh out of university with a minor in Computer Science. My programming at the university was all on punch cards that were fed to the state's central Univac. 2 hours later we would get the results back, make corrections, feed the cards back in, and hope for the best.

When I was hired as a programmer on an IBM S/34, I had never heard of the computer or of RPG, even though I went to school 45 minutes from Rochester and had even toured the IBM Rochester plant with the Math / Computer Science club. I learned RPG through some self paced IBM books at work from a course that the system operater had taken. I went to an open terminal (I did not even have my own terminal until 5 years later when we went to a S/38) and keyed in my first program. I was amazed to go to the computer room to find it had compiled correctly and had already printed out. WOOT! No more 2 hour waits for compiles! We had a maxed out S/34 with 256 Kb of Memory and 256 Mb of hard drive.

What really struck me about your post was the help you used to be able to get from IBM. Our SE and sales rep were there quite often. I remember being surprised when our SE quit being an SE and transfered to be a sales rep for IBM. In my mind, being a technical person like an SE was a higher position than sales but there must have been more money in sales. My boss designed and I coded an MRT order entry program that was reaching the 64K limit. We gave the code listing to our SE who gave it to Bill Oberg at the Rochester plant. Bill went through the code in detail. It was one big RPG II program that had 3000 lines of code and 1000 lines of comments (all keyed in with S/34 line at a time SEU). He came back with suggestions on how to speed up the code and gave us ways to save space. He even told of where to change MULT to ADD in certain cases and where to use packed numbers and where not to. The final program was about 60K and we ran 3 copies of it where you would get assigned to a particular MRT based on your workstation id (?WS?).

We had 2 S/34's, one in Winona, MN and one in Milwaukee. Our first upgrade was to a S/38 in Winona and a S/36 in Milwaukee. We needed to install the S/36 in Milwaukee way sooner, however, because we needed more salespeople yesterday and the S/36 allowed more than 16 workstations. We used DDFF (the S/34 version of DDM) to transfer data from one S/34 to another but DDFF on the S/34 was not compatible with DDM on the S/36. Our CE came in after hours with us and helped us code an ICF program to transfer files between the S/34 and S/36. We sure had good help back then.

Blair Hamren

MRTs! Wow, that brings back memories that I have since repressed. Carson Soule (more on Carson later!) once presented (at COMMON, I think), a killer S/36 MRT technique. I don't remember the details, but using it I wrote some S/36 progams that screamed.

rp

Once again, Paul nails it: while marketing has indeed been abysmal, the on-time and on-target delivery of critically-needed technical advancements is the real curse of the iSeries. We'll revisit this topic laster.

rp

Wayne: at some point, don't forget to tell your story about speeding out of a parking lot--having left a 5250 Model 11 terminal on the top of your car.

rp

I am going to post that story in the 25th Anniversary Forum on Reminiscence (or however you spell that). I have already put one forum post there with some stories. Everyone will just have to look there soon .. to hear the story of the great demise of one 5250 Model 11 terminal!

Hey Roger -

You wrote:

I think an IBM bean counter threw up her arms in frustration...

You know, having anyone throwing up arms (or anything else for that matter) is not a visual I like to dwell on, but having an IBM bean counter do it, well, that's just too much...

I also remember the days when IBM SEs roamed the Earth. I had good and bad impressions of them. The good was that they were incredibly helpful. The bad was that they were openly contemptuous of the very first IBM PCs. I remember our SE would visit, take a look at the PC, ask me how I liked IBM's new "little toy," shake his head and walk away.

Having come from a university and a company using fast, sexy HP 3000s and 1000s, the S/34 seemed like a "special needs" system -- it couldn't speak ASCII or RS-232, and at a time when small VT-100 terminals took up a square foot on a desktop, the 5251-11 took up a parking place.

Although I did come to respect the dependability of the S/34, what I really enjoyed was the 8-inch floppy magazine drive that had a smoked-plexiglass door. I would place things on a photocopier, such as wind-up toys, hands, whatever, take a copy, and then tape the copy on the inside of the plexiglass door. It looked like the objects were floating or pressed up against the door.

One day, I'd pressed my face against the copy machine, took a photocopy, and taped the copy on the inside of the S/34 door. Later in the day, the company bean counter came in, and in the middle of asking me a question, looked over at the S/34 door with my goofy face pressed against it in what looked like a silent scream, and he yelled out "Good lord!!" He didn't finish his question, and left the room.

Bean counters. They're either throwing up their arms or seeing faces in computers.

... Chuck

Hmmm. In retrospect, I understand your disgust. Throwing up a green bean, is bad enough! But your arms? Wow.

rp

Since several of you are fondly remembering IBM SEs, you'll be happy to hear that we are reprinting in the April issue one of our all-time favorite April Fools gag ads -- the one for the IBM SE doll. Katie Tipton, a NEWS editor at the time, took a Ken doll and made a little suit and briefcase for it. I wrote the text. In spite of being clearly labeled "April Fools," we had a number of people try to order it. They were greatly disappointed to learn they couldn't! Watch for that ad along with other classic April Fools jokes in your April issue.

Does anyone remember the System 3? I started on a System/3 Mod 10 or was it a Mod 15? Since I was not the world's greatest typist, I just loved the 3741 diskettes. No more waste punched cards. If I made a typo, just hit backspace and try again.

Paul Conte wrote

From my perspective, the problem hasn't been IBM marketing. Instead, it's been critical failures to advance the language, tools, and UI technology in the same dramatic way that the S/38 advanced the system architecure.

====

I entirely agree with Paul, and I'll take it even a little further. Not only failed IBM to advance the platform on the language level, they also did this on the hardware level. IBM for example was late to adopt a CD drive in its box or to adopt Ethernet i/o cards. For years, as/400 people struggled with installs from tape media (or worse, diskette?), struggled with token ring and twinax wiring while the rest of the world advanced. And talking of advances in Intel or AMD commodity CPU's. They all run 64bit these days, can carry multiple cores and run at clock speeds above 3GHZ. Commodity Wintel server boards now contain say 8 double-core 64bit CPU's --effective 16 CPU's-- at a price the IBM sales rep wouldn't dare to pronounce anymore the price of a comparable powered iseries. And even worse, suppose the sales rep must reveal the existance of the 5250 tax; the price simply doubles if the customer wants green screen, text based 5250 connectivity...

I must conclude that the iseries business proposal -- and yes, the system is very stable, lots of fans and stories around -- in today's context, has become almost a bad joke, IMHO.

I figure that IBM was forced to retire the SE as a position when customers began clamoring for personal computers, and shrink-wrapped software, and calling for business models where software and services were unbundled from hardware.

In the past, organizations were willing to pay $250,000 for a server that was capable of supporting 100 users, but now they spend more than that amount to supply 100 people with personal computers, shrink-wrapped software, technical support, and services related to distributed computing models.

It seems that the SE was replaced by a guy who now expends a full-time effort managing the server farm, sending out company emails about server down-time, and helping people protect (or recover) their workstations from viruses, and another guy dedicated to helping people transfer data between servers and their personal computers, and another guy dedicated to integrating and managing disparate systems, and another guy...(you get the picture).

We live in a complex world. Of course we look back with nostalgia, and yearn for simpler times. At some point we may even give up distributed computing models, and return to centralized servers, when we figure out how to support highly-interactive GUI interfaces on low-cost appliance-workstations, interfacing with robust server-based applications.

Remember that slogan from Sun, "The network IS the computer"? If the industry heads back in that direction, the System i may just be that thing your appliance-workstation connects to.

Nathan M. Andelin

I ran across some revealing statistics that may counter-balance the images that come to mind by Roger's reference to the lumber yard's shop foreman's interesting collection of female "documentation".

In the United States nearly 73 percent of young women graduate from high school, compared to 65 percent of young men. Young men are more likely to drop out of school than young women.

Approximately 61 percent of young men enroll in college immediately following high school, compared to 72 percent for young women.

In 1950, 70 percent of those enrolled in college were males, and 30 percent were females; by 2010 projections estimate 40 percent will be males, and 60 percent will be females.

Women have earned more bachelor's degrees than men every year since 1982 and more masters degrees since 1986.

Perhaps women are thinking in a more procedurally oriented manner than men, following a set of steps to achieve desirable results, while men are thinking in a more object oriented manner, getting caught up with the attributes of objects they see in their minds, and reference through visually oriented documentation.

Nathan M. Andelin

Nathan--

Just like virtually all other documentation I've since encountered, the female documentation I referenced was woefully inadequate, misleading, and in some places, just plain wrong!

rp

You mean you don't have a serious drinking problem?

Coming from the guy who taught me to drink red _and_ white wine with Indian food, that's a curious question!

rp