Talk:ISeries

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I'm not sure this article's existence is necessary, since the iSeries is nothing more than a rename of the AS/400, whose features and history are fairly well covered in the AS/400 article. I think having two articles that describe the very same system is confusing, which is why 'iSeries' redirected to 'AS/400' for so long. In a similar vein, i5/OS is not a `successor' to OS/400 but is, again, a renaming. Do some digging on IBM's site and you'll notice that `i5/OS' and `OS/400' are both used interchangibly to describe the SAME REVISION (V5R2 and V5R3) of the OS. Doubtlessly in the future the naming convention will be moved to i5/OS, but the name doesn't indicate anything fundamentally different about the system's design. Another concern is the line "Extremely reliable and virus resistent 9th Generation 64 bit object oriented operating system" since TIMI actually defines all pointers as 128 bits wide, which would technically make OS/400 (i5/OS) a 128-bit OS even though it currently runs on 64-bit hardware. Additionally, I'm not sure the term "object oriented" is totally appropriate. Though the system's fundamental interface is through the object, the term "Object Oriented" has come to mean something very different from the concept of Objects and Libraries in OS/400 terms.

Please input your thoughts! -- uberpenguin 14:28, 2005 Feb 7 (UTC)

Hmm... Not intending any disrespect for the authors of this article, but to me it sounds like little more than a marketing ad (almost all the images are taken from various IBM marketing overview pages for the iSeries). It contains a large list of features praising the iSeries, but no criticisms or really any substantive reading at all; the "misconceptions" section takes an apologetic tone and only shoots down claims made against the system as trivial (what's more, several of the assertations made are dangerously broad). The entire tone is pretty un-encyclopedic, and while it contains a lot of information, none of it is elaborated upon or clarified enough to consider this a useful article to the reader. The article just throws information at the reader leaving them to sort through and make sense of it.

I don't want to just whine without suggesting solutions, and as I have already pointed out, the existing AS/400 article is better laid out and for the most part still applies to the iSeries. I think your efforts would be better directed towards expanding that article, since I still believe that it is wholly unnecessary to have two AS/400-related articles. The people I know who are most experienced with AS/400s and iSeries still refer to them collectively as 'the four-hundred,' so in my mind the existance of this article is up for question. If you feel differently or can shed some different insight onto this situation, please post back here. Your work on this article is evident and valuable, but I'd like to make sure it gets directed to the proper location and is conveyed in a way that best reflects the ideal Wikipedia style. -- uberpenguin 05:36, 2005 Mar 20 (UTC)