At the risk of sounding irreverent about the last great programming revolution of the 20th century, did you ever wonder where Sun Microsystems really got Java? I know, I know! Sun swears it got the idea of the language while sitting around a coffee shop in San Jose. However, scientific fossil evidence suggests that Java has been in existence for much longer: between 800,000 and 1.8 million years longer. Of course, I’m not speaking of Sun Microsystems’ language but of the original Java man, an early type of Homo erectus whose fossil remains were found in 1891. Java man still has a lot to teach us today as we watch Sun and IBM laboring to ring in the new century with their massive technological schemes.

Java man was a tool builder, too. Archeologists have found many remains of stone tool choppers with thick, steeply cut edges that are believed to have belonged to this ancient humanoid. But the people of Java have made other technological contributions as well, including the invention of the outrigger canoe, the domestication of the ox and water buffalo, the wayang (puppet-shadow theater), gamelan (wind and percussion orchestra), and batik (a technique of dyeing fabrics with the use of wax). And, as if to mock our massive, modern technological schemes of object-oriented programming—and especially the grandeur of IBM’s San Francisco Project—the people of Java have already created the largest man-made object in the Southern Hemisphere. This, of course, is the massive Buddhist temple of Borobudur, built 400 years before the cathedrals of Europe were begun. It was created by over 45,000 stonecutters, sculptors, and carriers who labored during the Sailendra dynasty between A.D. 750 and 842. Their little object-oriented venture created 1.3 million exquisitely carved stone blocks that encase a hill to commemorate the Buddha. (Eat your heart out, IBM!)

So, what’s all this got to do with the modern Java programming language or computer technology? On the eve of the 21st century, on the shores of the new Internet sea, the island computing platform called the AS/400 is experiencing a rediscovery by other computing civilizations. The great technological advances made by IBM on the AS/400—single-level store, integrated relational database, the object-oriented operating system of OS/400, and the Technology Independent Machine Interface (TIMI)—are now being unearthed by these colonizing cultures. Internet explorers and programmers are arriving in droves to embrace and to extend their own technologies by using the knowledge

they gain from exposure to the AS/400. Of course, the medium through which these other computing civilizations are finding the AS/400 is the platform-independent programming language called Java and the Java Virtual Machine. Over the next five years, this technological rediscovery of the venerable architecture of the AS/400 will have as massive an impact on the computing industry as the unearthing of ancient civilizations of the past. The AS/400 will astound them, puzzle them, and edify their imaginations.

But don’t be surprised if what they say about the AS/400 platform sounds a bit provincial at first. We’ve already heard the AS/400 called a legacy machine. We will hear it called primitive and archaic and old and proprietary for a few more years to come. Every colonizing culture uses adjectives such as these to describe something beyond its immediate comprehension.

More important than the labels they initially assign is the fact that these new denizens of the Internet sea are, in fact, arriving. And Java brings them to us. They will come in outriggers made of Java-enabled browsers, network computers, and ported UNIX server applications. How we greet these new technological immigrants will determine the success and prosperity of our IT shops for years to come.

If we attempt to ignore the new technologies that they bring, the AS/400 machines themselves will be supplanted, abandoned, and forgotten. At the same time, the great investments our companies have made in our information systems will be lost in a new jungle of conflicting and competing technologies such as Microsoft Windows NT and ActiveX and UNIX shells. If we welcome these new arrivals, our companies’ work with the AS/400 will go on, and we’ll be able to enlist the new technologies to build still greater systems. But Java is the key, the linchpin, the lingua franca of this new era of productivity. Consequently, IBM has embraced it for the AS/400.

On the island of Java, one hears the saying “Bhinneka tunggal ika.” The Indonesian Republic has adopted this saying, which has an approximate English translation of “Unity in Diversity,” as its motto. A better motto could not be devised for the AS/400, nor for those of us here at Midrange Computing. Java and the Internet have a lot to teach us. We’re here to share it with you.

Thomas M. Stockwell Editor in Chief

Thomas M. Stockwell is an independent IT analyst and writer. He is the former Editor in Chief of MC Press Online and Midrange Computing magazine and has over 20 years of experience as a programmer, systems engineer, IT director, industry analyst, author, speaker, consultant, and editor.  

 

Tom works from his home in the Napa Valley in California. He can be reached at ITincendiary.com.