All of which means that the AS/400 is ready and waiting for the brave new world of object-oriented programming when it finally arrives, and it already offers the kind of security that the Object Management Group and its acolytes will spend years trying to replicate; the downside of all this of course is that we are talking about IBM Corp here, and the Armonkeys who dithered so long about making a strategic decision between the mainframe and the AS/400 that they fatally allowed the latter to be perceived in the market as being as much of a Jurassic Park specimen as System 360 can probably be relied upon to snatch ignominious defeat from the jaws of victory – after all, these are the same people who after spending three fortunes writing OS/2, which with luck will be as successful as Unisys Corp’s CTOS, are about to pour another $500m down the same drain to promote OS/2…
