Trevor Perry’s recent blog post Asleep at the wheel asks How many of you have told someone outside this community about this amazing platform?
Well, I for one, can say that I did just that … and continue to do so as often as I can.
I was at a party a friend of mine was throwing … most of the people were of the geeky persuasion … and a guy asked me what I did.
I told him about my work with MKS and the product I developed for the IBM i platform.
He mentioned that he had heard of the AS/400 … but thought it had been withdrawn by IBM a lone time ago. I told him that the platform was alive and well … although quite misunderstood.
Apparently he had done some C programming on the AS/400 quite a long time ago.
One thing lead to another .. and we got on to the topic of hardware platforms … at which point I mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that programs developed for IBM i can completely change hardware platforms without being recompiled. Code developed on a 48bit CISC system can be moved to a 64bit RISC system unmodified and run perfectly.
To this responded: “That’s impossible”.
I went on to describe how every program has a template of information required to regenerate the program so it will run correctly on a new hardware platform.
He asked me if this applies to C programs also. I responded affirmatively.
He asked a few more insightful questions … and seemed genuinely interested.
At the end of the conversation I think he was suitably impressed.
While I don’t think he’s necessarily going to be a convert … he is certainly more educated on the platform than he was before.
Hear, hear!