Wow, so IBM has been making bloated OSes longer than Microsoft has. I'm curious: what do you get in that 6GB? (I mean other than a corporate philosophy) Certainly not a crufty GUI or a big ol' web browser...
Well, I don't know about the really high-end stuff, but our AS/400 OS takes about 5 GB, of course that is with all the networking, compilers, Office Vision, several Client Access versions and all the goodies that come in the base OS realease.
No GUI here. GUI is for two things: graphic artists and people too stupid to remember simple commands. They do have a virtual console that runs under Windows or OS/2, but we rarely use it.
Of course, for giving up the pretty picture, we get reliability. Even when the air conditioning went out last summer and three hard drives (out of 30 or so) overheated and died, the system had no unplanned down time. Everything was raid protected, so we stayed in business.
Also, we can support some 600 or so direct-connect devices (terminals & printers) and thousands of network connections. I would like to see any Win server do that...
Incidently, we do have a Win 2000 server running on a netfinity card integrated into the AS/400. There is something to be said for the quality of the hardware, as we have nary a problem from that Win system. On the other hand, when we were running a variety of Win 2000 servers on a variety of PC hardware configurations, we had a lot of trouble with them.
