A colleague recently contacted me asking if I would be interested in a video he had shot at the COMMON Exhibition in London in 1994. He was working with our Business Partner HiT from Belgium at the time and we shared a booth at the event. I had to cut a lot of the content out, it covered the presentation I did on High Availability and Disaster Recovery and the technology we had to make it possible, I seemed to keep saying how costly it was? The few minutes I have uploaded show the AS/400 and other technology we had to present our wares, how things have changed over the years (including me, I looked so young then).
The IBM Laptops we had were huge as you can see from the video, you had to be young to carry them around.. I remember running through London using the tube and lugging the thing around. You also needed to charge it so regularly it seemed like it was always plugged in.
You will also see one of our first AS/400’s (I believe they were called Model P05 for personal AS/400?) we had a couple of them for testing the HiT High Availability Product called Multiple Systems Software, (MSS not to be confused with the other IBM product called MSS which was a storage product that never seemed to take off??) that was written by Guy DeHond and his team at HiT (still see many of them around on LinkedIn). I originally supported the product while working for IBM Havant as it was shipped as an IBM supported product at the time. Eventually after leaving IBM I started Shield Software Services and took up a distributorship for the MSS product selling and supporting it in UK and Europe. Eventually the software and its technology was purchased by Lakeview Technology and merged into the MiMiX product. We then became a MiMiX distributor for Lakeview until 2003 when we sold the company. Now we have our own High Availability product built from all the lessons we learned while installing and supporting these products from our Shield Advanced Solutions Company in Canada.
Someone recently asked about a personal IBM i, this was it at the time and it never took off being removed from marketing after a few years. We actually gained a lot of benefit from the systems and the price allowed us an affordable entry into the market place.
Just as a side note, I am surprised at the size of the mobile phone I took out of my pocket. Just a phone but certainly compact for the day..
Anyhow just thought I would share a bit of history for fun.
you can view the video on youtube here
Chris…