Pinnacle wrote:
While I can depreciate the fact that Ed and Chris are inconvenienced
as software vendors from a support standpoint, most clients I deal
with find the 3-5 year depreciation cycle on IBM mainframes to be way
too short. I remember going to the IBM gripe, er, open discussion
session at SHARE a few years back where a number of government
customers were concerned about IBM shortening the life cycle of
mainframe hardware. Most of them had a 1-2 year procurement process
alone, which really put them behind the 8-ball by the time a decision
was made to purchase. That's one of the reasons that so many
government customers are not running the latest and greatest.
Tom,
I was there with you at that SHARE meeting. Bob Rogers and Mary Beth
Bradley were fielding questions from angry customers for the entire
session. That was a special (and especially bad) case and the customers
had every right to be angry!
At that time, IBM put out three operating system releases, back-to-back,
six months apart, each with different hardware requirements and very
little notice. Specifically:
o OS/390 V2R9 ran on any ESA/390-capable hardware.
o OS/390 V2R10 implemented an Architectural Level Set
(http://www.ibm.com/servers/s390/os390/plug.html) equivalent to 9672 G2.
o z/OS 1.1 implemented a second Architectural Level Set
(http://www.ibm.com/servers/s390/os390/plug1.html) equivalent to 9672 G5.
What IBM did was stupid. They screwed up badly. The customers revolted
and IBM promised never to do it again. And they haven't.
The next hardware level set wasn't until z/OS 1.6, when z/Architecture
-- the hardware introduced *seven* years ago in 2000 aka Freeway or z900
-- became a minimum requirement. There have been no similar level sets
since that time.
--
Edward E Jaffe
Phoenix Software International, Inc
5200 W Century Blvd, Suite 800
Los Angeles, CA 90045
310-338-0400 x318
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.phoenixsoftware.com/
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