Despite all IBM’s efforts to make the process as painless as possible, System/36 users are still reporting disappointment at the difficulty of migrating to AS/400, and, in particular the sluggard performance of the B10 and B20 models with a typical big 36 workload. It begins to look as if the B10 and 20 should be regarded only as first time machines for people moving up from micros, except where the upgrade is from the very smallest 36s but the B30 looks dauntingly expensive to many 36 users. Nine months after IBM announced the AS/400, it would seem that French users are still having problems transferring from System/36s and 38s, according to 01 Informatique. This is particularly the case with users of the System/36, who, having bought the cheaper, low end AS/400s are finding that they cannot cope with the workload of a System/36 – in particular when running in emulation mode, which by no means gets the best out of the machine. The introduction of version 1.2 of the OS/400 operating appears to have ironed out many of the difficulties encountered by System/38 users, who in general have found the switch much easier, save for one major ommission on IBM’s part. Bernard Thepaud, the head of Credit Mutuel’s computing department in Grenoble, reports facing trouble once the transferral of data from the System/38 to the AS/400 was over and the old machine abandoned. Several system crashes and one destroyed disk later, IBM tardily announced that Program Temporary Fixes were required to keep the system up and running. This came too late for Credit Mutuel, which had already lost an estimated six weeks’ work.
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