...company style, put out a tender to all its own design centres to come up with something to beat DEC. All the groups contribute flip-charts and flow-charts and descriptions of how the system would work.
Soltis walked into the meeting at IBM HQ with a working prototype.
He plugged it in and showed them the system in action. His group won the contract and the rest, as they say, is history. The AS400 was put together in two years and within a year after its launch it was the best-selling system in the history of IBM.
It is such a good story it is often thought apocryphal, so is it true? "That's about how it happened," admits Soltis. "Although, I never saw it as a VAX killer."
The Rochester plant grew and took on more responsibilities. And grew some more. Two years ago, IBM put all the development in the hands of Rochester. And in all that time, Soltis showed no sign of wanting to move anywhere else.
It is said that Soltis believed that Rochester was a great place to do development "because there isn't too much else to do and the winter cold makes people want to work". But talking to him, it becomes obvious that there is something much more. There is a streak in Soltis that says that while most Americans in the IT business would much rather live in Florida or California, Washington State or Massachusetts — anywhere but Minnesota — the place to craft solid, hard-working, reliable systems and architectures is in a place that lives those virtues.
Soltis does not like to leave Minnesota. "I really don't like travelling," he told ZDNet UK on one of his rare trips away from home. "I am happiest back home with the other engineers. Just put me in the lab and leave me."
But this diffidence is something he now finds he has to learn to deal with. The success of Rochester has taken Soltis from the shadows, and put him front and centre. Having fought to get his group recognised, the situation has now swung completely on the opposite direction to the extent that his division now carries the hopes of all of IBM.
That means more air miles for Soltis but he does not seem the type to grouse about that too much. Not when he has the chance to talk to more people about his favourite subject — computer architecture.
"The big breakthrough for us was the development of the Power architecture," he explains. "It was the first fully virtualised architecture. You know, people talk about that a lot, but we did it. It means the software is completely separated from the hardware. We saw that early on. The hardware changes all the time, but the software is hard, and expensive to change."
When Soltis was called in by IBM's senior management five years ago he was tasked with developing a five-year plan for IBM, he told them he would extend that virtual architecture across all of IBM's systems. The result is that IBM is now in a position where it can build solutions much more quickly and easily than it could before.
"With our virtualised architecture you can swap anything around. You can use the same components [in a PC or a mainframe] and...
Talkback
For 8 years, from its initial B series release to the E series, the AS400 and I worked together every day.
I may have rose colored glasses here, but through all its incarnations, the damn thing just ran. And ran. And no matter what you threw at it, no matter the semi-regular Cumulative Tapes <kume-tapes>", the precursor to today's never-ending Service Packs, you overlayed on it (generally to enhance it, not fix it!), it hardly ever crashed, hardlly ever needed even a reboot - it continued to churn away 24/7 doing that "dirty, boring work" that no company could survive without. Perhaps it was the proprietary-ness, perhaps it was the lack of flashy lights and pretty GUIs - or perhaps it was just designed by a quality engineer with a single purpose, to do a job and do it well.
I was not alone here - every time you bumped into another AS/400 engineer or operator, the same story. The bloody thing works. Despite IBM's perception that everything with the blue badge is way over-priced, no one ever seemed to complain about the AS/400's bang-for-buck.
Unfortunately time marched on and we needed to follow the Gate's model of future computing. So, are we better off?
The AS/400 served its masters well then, and it still does now, by all accounts. I must say, dealing each day with seemingly never ending system fails or almost daily patching, I miss that stability - and confidence.
Mr Soltis, take a bow.