[rescue] RE: [SunRescue] OT: AS/400 stuff

[James Lockwood]

On Wed, 6 Jun 2001, David Cantrell wrote:

> "Joshua D. Boyd" <jdboyd at cs.millersville.edu> wrote:
>
> > I wouldn't be surprised is IBM had a way to get it cheaper for the P390.
>
> IIRC you can get the card with VM for under US$20,000.  At least, I recall
> there being something like that mentioned in Linux Journal a year or so
> ago when they were going "ooh! shiny!" at the S390 port.

This is right.  It's quite a viable platform for small scale development
unless you have to hack channel controller code (which my group did).

> > That said, OS/390 is compliant enough to be certified unix.  This was a
> > strategic move to help encourage people to port their applications to
> > OS/390.
>
> You mean they threw in a bunch of compatibility libraries and utilities
> to keep the marketroids quiet.

No.  The OS/390/OpenMVS libraries are genuinely useful, unlike the POSIX
subsystem for NT.  C compilers have existed for MVS for a long time (and
integrate nicely with ISPF, thank you) and porting relatively clean code
is simple as long as it doesn't make too many assumptions.  ASCII charset
assumptions seemed to be the most glaring in code I ported.

-James