Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

[Michael Meissner <meissner@spectacle-pond.org>]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2001 at 11:16:27AM -0400, Rob Landley wrote:
> On Monday 25 June 2001 15:23, Kai Henningsen wrote:
> 
> > The AS/400 is still going strong. It's a virtual machine based on a
> > relational database (among other things), mostly programmed in COBOL (I
> > think the C compiler has sizeof(void*) == 16 or something like that, so
> > you can put a database position in that pointer), it doesn't know the
> > difference between disk and memory (memory is *really* only a cache), and
> > these days it's usually running on PowerPC hardware.
> >
> > ISTR there's a gcc port for the AS/400. Oh, and it does have normal BSD
> > Sockets. These days, it's often sold as a web server.
> >
> > Main customer base seems to be medium large businesses and banks.
> 
> The AS400 seems to be based out of Austin.  We hear a lot about it around 
> here...

Ummm, the AS/400 was based out of Rochester, Minnesota at least initially.  It
was the follow to System/3 -> System/36 -> System/38, and customers originally
programmed it in RPG-III and Cobol.  Now that AS/400's are based on special
PowerPC's, the home may have moved to Austin, which is the PowerPC/AIX center.
The AS/400 line was intended to be the mid-range system, between the mainframes
(360 -> 370 -> 3080 -> 3900 -> ???) and the PCs.

-- 
Michael Meissner, Red Hat, Inc.  (GCC group)
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