mainframes

This is the most authoritative and clearest description of the iSeries, its predecessors and of the technical innovations that made these systems the world's most-loved servers. Frank Soltis describes the origin and the development of revolutionary technical concepts which are pervaded by one fundamental thought: iSeries and its predecessors were designed for business, optimized for business and built for business. In a world where personal computers or engineering/scientific computers stray into business, and stick on business concepts as an afterthought, it is refreshing to find a clear description of a server that was designed and built as a total system, fully integrating all the hardware and software components a business needs. Throughout this text, Frank uses a conversational style and explains highly-technical concepts with a wonderful clarity. He combines the rare gift of common sense with the still rarer gift of remembering to use it. This gives us a wonderful text which is a pleasure to read and to keep as a reference.

This masterly work describes lucidly the technology that defines iSeries and the inside story of the product. I read Frank Soltis' first book "Inside the AS/400", and found that "Fortress Rochester" contained a massive amount of new information. It's such a pleasure to read a deeply technical treatise that also contains such fascinating accounts of the people behind the product, and how iSeries and its predecessors set the standard for small and intermediate business computing. I fully recommend this book, it's outstanding.

Frank Soltis' "Fortress Rochester" is the best account of both the way IBM's iSeries works and of the cirumstances inside IBM that lead to its creation. There are of course some highly technical parts to this book, and I followed them fine, but then I'm geeky. I bought three further copies of this book for the managers and executives in my company, and they all found large sections of the book (marked with a single 'chili pepper', indicating technical content was getting hotter (three peppers is the highest level geek stuff)) very readable and easily understandable. Those of us who have had the privilege of seeing Dr Frank speak live at COMMON and at IBM meetings or have attended his University of Minnesota lectures will find that this book is a written version of his Socratic way of teaching and explaining. I give this book six stars. It's the best - buy it - I bought four copies.