Sales
IBM sold an estimated 20,000 System/38s within the first five years of availability, according to articles published in industry magazines NEWS 34/38 and Midrange Computing. Although billed as a minicomputer, the S/38 was much more expensive than IBM's established best-selling System/34, and its replacement, the System/36. Of equal importance was the difficulty of upgrading from, say, a System/34 to a S/38. Although the machines had some similarities, such as twinax peripherals and RPG programming languages, in reality they were very different. IBM tacitly acknowledged this by bringing out the System/36 – an upgraded System/34 – after the launch of the S/38.
In the marketplace, IBM thus found itself with three overlapping, but incompatible, ranges. The System/34/36, the System/38 and the mainframe /360 architecture (that the System/38 was originally designed to replace). Digital Equipment Corporation, at that time one of IBM's main competitors, was able to exploit this by offering a wide range of products based on a single architecture. IBM's counter to this, the 9370 or 'baby mainframe', was a commercial failure.
The S/38's advanced operating system lives on with IBM's AS/400. Realising the importance of the thousands of lines of 'legacy code' (programs) written, 'AS' stands for 'Application System'. Great efforts were made by IBM to enable programs originally written for the System/34 and /36 to be moved to the AS/400. The AS/400 was replaced by the iSeries, which was subsequently replaced by the System i. In 2008, the System i was replaced by the IBM POWER Systems. By contrast, competing proprietary computing architectures from the early 1980s such as Digital's VAX, Wang VS and Hewlett Packard's HP3000 have long been discontinued without a compatible upgrade path.
Read more about this topic: IBM System/38
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