IBM persuaded some community college in the US to teach the RPG language by donating an AS/400. For the life of me, I can’t recall the name or location of the college. I left the field 20 years ago. I am sure they would have taught RPG IV. RPG II was a bear that, even those who knew the language, didn’t want to mess with if it came to modifying the programs.

RPG IV is a modernized version of the original RPG, Report Program Generator. I managed an AS/400 installation. Never programmed it but figured out how the language was designed. The predecessors to the AS/400 were the IBM System/3, System/32, and System/34 computers. These were built to replace the much earlier accounting machines that used punched cards for input. These machines were programmed using a plugboard with wires connecting the various holes in the plugboard. ENIAC, anyone? You had fixed positions on the punched cards for various data (operands). These data were read by the accounting machine, and the wires in the plugboard got the electrical impulses representing these operands. Necessarily, they corresponded to the fixed fields on the punched cards where those operands are positioned. The operator representing the operation to be performed — such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division or printing — would be wired on the plugboard. As the card reader read in the punched cards, much clanging of the relays happened and the simple calculations of the accounting machine were accomplished. The System/3 replaced the electromechanical relays with electronic switching systems and the plugboard and wires with the RPG language designed to mimic them. Then IBM introduced the System/38, the true predecessor (in terms of processor architecture) to the AS/400. For backward compatibility, IBM allowed the original primitive plugboard (wired program) programs to run on the System/38 and the AS/400 by providing the RPG compiler on these machines. Hundreds if not thousands of various accounting systems software could now run on the AS/400. You are talking about the computer introduced in 1989 (the AS/400) running programs written for a computer introduced in the very early 1960s (the System/3) which was emulating a 1930s accounting machine (IBM 304)! Entire MRP (Manufacuring Requirements Planning) systems, the predecessor to the ERP systems of today, were created on the System/38 in RPG II, as those machines were suitable price wise, for the medium scale businesses. These programs run perfectly on the AS/400 and many software vendors saw no reason to migrate them to C or C++ or even COBOL on the AS/400. One company, BCPL, decided to rewrite their MRP system in modern C for the AS/400. After spending $400 million on the rewrite, which was around their annual revenue, they failed and went bankrupt. The moral of the story is: let sleeping dogs lie and d

Sheesh, I read that as “I need a new wife”! And your very next sentence talked about your wife binge-watching the TV about hurricane news. How often does that coincidence happen!? :laugh:

I had a lot of trouble with my first car. It was cheap but that was all I could afford at that time. Having graduated with a MS in computer science (1971), I recalled my course in digital logic system design and wondered why the mechanical distributor in the car (which distributes electrical signals to the spark plugs) couldn’t be replaced with an electronic circuit. I didn’t have the money to develop the idea or to file a patent. Three months later, Chrysler Corporation announced the first electronic ignition system! Observing the mechanical pumps at fueling stations where the prices were being changed daily, I wondered why the prices could not be stored in digital memory with an easy change system and the calculations made with digital circuits. Today, all pumps have that kind of systems. The same idea applies to the fare meters in taxis. When I mentioned it to an experienced PhD electrical engineer and wondered if I could get a patent on it, he said that they would change the layout of the circuits and claim that wouldn’t infringe on my patent if I got one. When a year later my younger brother in India wanted an idea for a senior project in electrical engineering, I told him about the electronic taxi meter and sent him a few TTL circuits made by Texas Instruments. He designed a taxi meter with those parts and he got written up in the local newspaper for his invention! Today, a cyclocomputer (used to measure time, distance, speed, etc) on a bicycle which is essentially the same thing can be had for under $20.

Maybe not. But people are paying extra for the “Full self-driving” feature, expecting that is what it means and fail to read the small print full of weasel words. And that is what causes the fatal and non-fatal accidents. And the weasel words protect Elon Musk. By the way, since “Full self-driving” is a software, it is not transferable from one Tesla owner to the next! That gives me an idea: if power steering, power brakes, cruise control can be enabled/disabled by software which merely trips a circuit, car manufacturers can disable the function when the vehicle is sold in the used-car market and charge for enabling it again!

I changed my reply from millionaires to billionaires because anyone who had bought a house in the 1990s is probably a millionaire today merely because of the inflation in the price of homes. (My home was NOT in California which is seeing hyper-inflation in home prices.) To add to that, maxed-out contributions to 401(k) and purchasing company stock through stock purchase plans add to one’s wealth. Anybody in the tech business in the US can become a millionaire by the time he retires, though a million dollars nowadays may not mean what it once did. Anyone who starts his 401(k) plan at age 22 and continues for 45 years would certainly be a self-made millionaire and an ethical and honest one at that. I compare these situations to those in power at Oracle or SAP. False promises that are never kept, continuously forcing upgrades on customers that waste time and money, etc. SAP customers who have customized some of SAP functions to meet their specific requirements are told all of that would have to go by the wayside when they move to the cloud. What happens to their business? The attitude is: cut your feet if they don’t fit the shoe I have sold you. I was working for a high-tech company that had 5 customers in 1996. The total number of customers it had in its entire history is maybe 1200 and its product portfolio over the company’s life was 160. Our revenue was over $800 million so we were a cash cow. A Big 4 consultant recommended that we install SAP. If I had gone along with that, I could have become an SAP consultant a year later and billed out at $300 an hour. I couldn’t see why the company needed SAP. We were the reference site for all semiconductor companies without semiconductor foundries in the Bay Area for our hardware and software vendors. But the consultant asked for $13 million to advise me on how to implement SAP. Right there you could see the ethical conflict. Read about Jeff Bezos’s warehouse workers who can’t even take a bathroom break. Read about the UPS drivers who carry a bottle to pee into. Read the horror stories About the Oracle ERP implementation disaster at Birmingham City Council (UK). Then tell me that billionaires earn their money ethically. I will then know which way your ethical compass points.

… the vast majority of billionaires are self-made snake oil salesmen. FTFY. Eg. Oracle and SAP. And Elon Musk with his self-driving automobiles.

Corning, CA is the olive capital of California. I once had a humble pizza topped with tons of black olives at a local pizzeria. It had a newspaper column about once having baked a very, very, very large pizza. I can’t recall the name of the place. Absolutely the best pizza I have had. PS. I realize that a pizza is nothing compared to the fancy items you guys are talking about but still it remains the best pizza I have eaten.

It was de riguer for engineering students to have a slide rule prior to the days of calculators.

How many hard drives did you have on that AS/400? I had 5 drives on the one I used, the disk storage was RAIDed. When we had to replace the supposedly failing drives (IBM sent me a note saying that the drives weren’t up to their standard of 1 million hours MTBF so they were going to replace them), all that the service engineer (SE) did was to shut down one drive at a time, remove that drive, put in the new drive, power it up, and wait 20 minutes for data to be re-created on the new disk from the RAID information from the other disks. Not knowing how trivial the process was, I had scheduled the SE to come in at 12 midnight on a Sunday which I figured was when the computing load would be the lowest. I could have saved myself the trouble of staying up that night and could have scheduled the maintenance for Monday morning 10 AM!

You are right on the dot about Amazon as a publisher. I know a 13-year-old high school kid in Chennai, India who got his book published by Amazon. It is an adventure story set in Central America, God only knows where he got the idea and how he got the details about Central American jungle right but the book was good enough for Amazon to agree to publish it.

Push your luck. Go buy a lottery ticket.😁

No. The extended warranty would be an optional cost of acquiring the vehicle. Profits are what remain after all costs are deducted.

In the past (and even now), there was/is an annual maintenance contract with the software vendor that paid for upgrades and bug fixes. It is like buying an extended warranty for your car. My question remains: what justifies per-user pricing? PS. I brought in Oracle as an example of egregious business practices that is enabled by per-user pricing.

So, if I buy a truck from General Motors for my freight carrying business, I should share my profits with GM?

My question was: Should software be priced differently than ordinary goods? What is the justification for it? The production process is similar. An automobile manufacturer has a design bureau to design a new vehicle; production engineers to manufacture the vehicle; test engineers who test the vehicle for safety, compliance with various laws, etc; and a marketing and sales group to advertise the new vehicle and sell it through dealerships; and a service organization that coordinates warranty repairs through the dealership. A software company has senior developers who design the software; development engineers who write the code; test engineers who test the functionality of the software; and maintenance engineers who perform fixes when errors are discovered. The production process is far easier as one has to only copy hundreds of CDs as opposed to an automobile where several body parts have to be pressed out of sheet metal; the body has to be welded together and painted; the engine has to be cast and machined; the transmission has to be forged and machined: and the entirety of parts have to be brought together in an assembly line to be assembled into a complete vehicle. But an automobile is not priced on the basis of whether it is a single user vehicle or to be used by a family of six. Why the difference then except that the software guys have the customer by the gonads and are willing to squeeze hard to extract money?

Doctors, lawyers and consultants are all similar. You pay regardless of if they fail or succeed.

Software is a product. Much like TV, automobile, washing machine, etc. The latter are tangible while software is intangible but that is not an important difference. Once upon a time, when you bought a software, you paid one price for it, no matter how many persons in the purchaser company used it. Then they decided to charge according to the power of the processor the purchaser company used. This is like saying you have a larger living room and so the TV is higher priced. Then they decided to charge price/user. This is akin to the price of the TV or washing machine being dependent on how many persons are in the household. Now, Oracle has gone one step further and its Java licenses are based on the number of employees in the purchaser company, including janitors or messenger boys they may employ. If a customer refuses to accept the new terms, which yield hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars more in revenue to Oracle, Oracle is threatening an audit of those companies to determine if any of the contractual terms are violated by the purchaser. Companies have sprung up to assist the purchasers in questioning the findings of these audits. What makes software different from common household goods such as TV, automobiles, etc? What justifies differential pricing based on number of users? Other than the greed of software vendors.

I was treated for COVID in the US in 2022. I didn’t pay for hospitalization as: A) I am eligible for Medicare B) I think the US government mandated free treatment as they didn’t want untreated patients wandering through the country spreading the infection. I did pay for tests and certain fees for the doctors, amounting to about $5,000. As I had mentioned earlier, I had a cardiac arrest when I reached the hospital and they resuscitated me after some 4 minutes of heart stoppage. I guess the pumping of my chest supplied enough blood to my brain so I don’t have brain damage (I think). The doctors were very good. But they were quite surprised that the two stents in my LAD artery stayed put despite vigorous pounding of my chest and possibly using electric shock to restart my heart. The doctor’s comment (he had trained at Harvard Medical School) was: any hospital in the US can put in stents but this level of quality is possible only in the top ten hospitals in this country. My stents were put in at a hospital in Kolkata, India. The nursing care was good M-F but around 3 pm Friday, the nurses would start going home and then till Monday morning, nursing care was abysmal. I got myself evacuated to India for further treatment. Last year, I returned to the US and caught COVID again. Ran back to India. COVID subsided but left me with kidney failure. I guess I could return to the US for free dialysis but I found I can easily pay $60 ( I could price shop and get a lower price but saving $20 is not worth it) for each dialysis session three times a week out of pocket rather than go through the US medical system. I get excellent care, the doctor visits me during the dialysis session to find out how I am doing, any minor infections are treated at once with antibiotics (antibiotics cost me $2 for my current UTI). If necessary, the technician comes to my home for drawing blood or collecting urine/stool samples. In short, I am treated with great care and kindness. The equipment is the same as you would find in Europe or the US. The hospital will ensure my safety as I am a cash cow for them (kidding). Most of the doctors have undergone training in the US or UK after their basic medical degree from India and so are conversant with the most current medical treatments. The number of patients the doctors see in India is huge. They see every disease in every stage of progression so that their practical knowledge is very very high. I can’t ask for or get better medical care.

I have gotten a floppy drive that connects to the USB port.