IBM System/1

Yes, but over a very long time. The IBM minis came out of the S/360 family in the late 1960s. IBM had a very low end S/360 intended for small businesses, which unfortunately, was not really a S/360 (big incopatibilities, like half the registers!). IBM decided to split the product off, as it was selling, and proved that the business minicomputer was a real thing. They decided to come up with a new design, the S/3, in the very early 1970s. It too was a good seller, and led to other models further down the line - S/32, S/34, S/38, then S/36 (note that some of these machines are wildly different, but made for the same market). The last two were used, along with some ideas from a project called "FS", to make the AS/400 in the mid-1980s. Did all of this steal mainframe applications? Well, not directly, but yes. But as you can see, it has been happening for 30 years now. Additionally, the was not just an IBM thing - DEC witnessed the same shift, as the PDP-11 and VAX took applications away from the PDP-10. While many hackers complain and dislike AS/400s, they really are very interesting, well built machines (but very unhackable - one of the big problems for us.). They are damn near bulletproof, in both the hardware and software end. If you order an AS/400 from IBM, you unpack it and turn it on. That's it - it works perfectly. It doesn't crash, even when bogged down. System administration really is not much of an issue, unlike a Unix or NT box. Massive architecture changes can happen (and have) without problems. The financial and business people love them... William Donzelli aw288(a)osfn.org