> > If we do another native OS port, I'd be more interested in bringing > > i5OS > Already virtualized on its own platform, sounds rare and kinky to > duplicate that > on the 390.
Not really. There are a lot of large shops that have significant numbers of small to medium iSeries boxen that they'd give their grandmother's eyeteeth to move to either Intel or Z virtual machines so that they could completely eliminate an entire hardware platform (and an enormous amount of floor space). > > AIX > Died a slow and natural death on the mainframe in the 1980's. Not really a fair comparison. AIX/370 was a perverse evil mutant thing from hell that didn't die a second too soon. Modern AIX (ie post-AIX 4) is actually a pretty nice OS, and a lot different from AIX/370 or AIX/RT (which spawned it). As pseudo-realtime OSes go, modern AIX has a lot to be said for it (it actually would be a much superior replacement for Comm Server for Linux guests; the Linux/SNA glue is really unnatural and weird, while the SNA bits on AIX are much better integrated). > > OpenVMS would be even more attractive from the canned system front > > > VMS was a lot of fun, but is anyone still using it outside maintenance > mode? Been in an machine tool factory or IKEA recently? We're actually seeing an uptick in OpenVMS now that it runs on reasonably inexpensive Intel hardware. It's a tight, clean, secure little OS that is fabulously good at canned application systems. OpenVMS's largest historical problem was the expensive DEC/Compaq/HP custom hardware vs commodity gear.
