[geeks] Re: [SunRescue] TCF?!

[Ken Hansen]

In the abstract, an AS/400 is a very nicely designed *business* system. It has two tow really great features:

1) CPU microcode is reprogrammable (very important when trying to displace an installed S/34 or system 38 - you could load up a microcode image that made the AS/400 natively emulate a System/3X box),

2) All storage was (IIRC) mapped into one *huge* address space, meaning a 4 gigabyte drive would map directly to a 4 gigabyte chunk of the memory address space, and accessing the devices could be as simple as refering to a particular address.

How useful these functions would be "out in the wild" is questionable, but the hardware is nice.

To turn an AS/400 into a file server seems abit, um, beneath it's abilities (IMHO)...

BTW, your last statement is interesting - most businesses *only* buy machines that the run the software they need - business don't buy Macs becuase they are "cool", they buy them becuase they are the best platform, with the best support for a give application (say, desktop publishing)...

Ken

-----Original Message-----
From: Joshua D. Boyd [mailto:jdboyd at cs.millersville.edu]
Sent: Thursday, May 03, 2001 11:29 AM
To: geeks at sunhelp.org
Cc: rescue at sunhelp.org
Subject: Re: [geeks] Re: [SunRescue] TCF?!


So, what does one do with an AS400?  If I bought what, what could I get it
to do other than sit there and look pretty?  Is it a cost effective way to
get a database server?  Can the things be cheaply colo'ed?  I'm all for
old hardware, but I never understood what the average person could do with
an AS/400 (or why a company would want them unless the software they
needed required one).