
Welcome to the public AS/400 - omnibrain
http://pub1.de
======
kev009
If you're into operating systems design I defiantly recommend buying and
reading through [http://www.amazon.com/Fortress-Rochester-Inside-Story-
iSerie...](http://www.amazon.com/Fortress-Rochester-Inside-Story-
iSeries/dp/1583040838).

The i OS is very different than UNIX and this book was quite enlightening to
me. Some of the stuff done is quite visionary. The hardware micro-architecture
has fundamentally changed four times, but the upper OS and users doesn't care.

~~~
twoodfin
That looks great, too bad it's currently $80 used! I really enjoyed Soltis'
more formal "Inside the AS/400"[1], available for a mere 77¢!

[1] [http://smile.amazon.com/Inside-AS-400-Frank-
Soltis/dp/188241...](http://smile.amazon.com/Inside-AS-400-Frank-
Soltis/dp/1882419669/)

~~~
kps
According to one of the reviews, it's the same book.

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bdg
I'm happy to see this. I'm only in my 20s so I haven't grown up with mainframe
computing in my life, but I did get to use both an AS/400 and z/OS about 5
years ago. I've been tweeting and emailing into the dark asking IBM to just
provide a free VM of one of these so I can at least play around and learn
about them more. I was just getting into assembly on one when I lost access.

~~~
craigching
You mean like this?

[http://www.hercules-390.org/](http://www.hercules-390.org/)

EDIT: Sorry, that's a link to an OS/390 VM, _not_ AS/400\. That was how I
originally read your post, that you wanted a z/OS VM to play with. But, it's a
useful link nonetheless ;)

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morganvachon
Well this brings back memories. I took an AS/400 class in college (local tech
school) since that was the only way to learn SQL back then; none of the other
CIS classes offered database programming. The class was geared towards
prepping the student for working at one of two companies in the area that
hired AS/400 programmers, so it was very narrowly focused to their needs.

I have to say, that was a simultaneously challenging and frustrating
experience. It soured me on being a programmer of any sort, and I ended up
shifting to network administration as a field of study. I'm glad I did.

All that said, this seems like a generous and handy service for those who need
it.

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drakaal
There is still great pay if you are an AS/400 guru. About 3 years ago I
interviewed for a job where I would be maintaining code which was running on
an AS/400 running in System 36 emulation mode. The code had been certified by
the government for a 50 year contract. The 3 previous employees had all died.
Which didn't make me anxious to take the job, but the pay was $450k a year.
And with job security through 2030 it had some appeal. But what do you do
after?

"I have experience with 50 year old software" is kind of like the resumes
people send me saying they know Office XP and Word Perfect.

Sure if you can fix the things nobody else can you can charge top dollar, but
eventually the last of those things come out of service.

~~~
dodders
In 2006, Gartner estimated there were still 180 billion lines of COBOL code
running in production [1].

I don't believe a significant proportion will have been retired since.

Languages never die - they just keep running...

[1]
[http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9004821/Cobol_The_New...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9004821/Cobol_The_New_Latin)

~~~
drakaal
RPG has a significantly lower install base, and I would say it is mostly dead.

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opless
I wonder how long it will take for someone to get QSYSOPR privs and invoke
pwrdwnsys *immed ?

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Pfiffer
If anyone is looking for some good discussion about mainframes, there was a
lot of good content that came out in this thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4446880](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4446880)

------
rzkh
RZKH welcomes all friends and people interested in AS400. It's always the same
situation - when they come from the unixoid world - they are confused. But you
should stay on the path and learn some bit about AS400 (or IBM i as they are
called now). It's the only commercially used 128Bit operating system with high
level security and low level problems :)

Have fun, Holger

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cake
Wow no idea why someone would need that, I have to work with an AS/400 and let
me tell you it's no fun !

~~~
lotsofcows
I worked on AS/400 for quite a while. Really enjoyed it.

Updating old RPG terminal based code to Java web based stuff was interesting.
Simple CRUD interfaces port easily.

And once you're running Java stuff on OS/400 it's also easy to port to the
linux environment. And from there is just an argument over databases to bye-
bye proprietary hardware.

~~~
cake
That's my experience too, it's mostly basic CRUD interfaces. People say it's
fast but that's because it gives you the most barebones user-hostile interface
you could have.

The company paid IBM $100k to upgrade a single server and this shit is locked
with licences for cores and memory. It's not even that fast.

The problem is they are too deep in it now but this shit needs to die.

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mikelbring
We used one of these at my old job, well the IMB iSeries but the database was
started in the early 80s. Fun times, all the employees where still on green
screen when I was there (2011-2012). We started to move everyone to a web
application that accessed the AS/400 data.

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NicoJuicy
Ugh, i remember working on an AS 400 at school. I hated that and if i'm not
mistaking, there wasn't support no more, when we had to learn it :-s

I suppose those jobs earn well (think of AS 400 as watching the Matrix in code
(black screen, green letters) and Neo is losing the fight )

~~~
colanderman
No, they don't, because it's a buyer's market.

(My dad is an AS/400 programmer. There's a lot of competition and not much
work.)

~~~
whattssonn
It depends. If you have only traditional RPG/400 etc experience there are 10
programmers for each job, yes. But, in this marketplace, if you have
experience with (traditional) RPG but also modern techniques like OO, Java,
etc, you have lots of work for the coming decennia i assure you. These systems
don't disappear, but they do have to be "modernized" and refitted to
accommodate the changing environment. There is demand for it, but business do
not know it's a modern system for which you can build modern software. The
traditional RPG programmer will say something like "well XML and web services
etc is too difficult, let's just use CSV and FTP like always". These days it's
called "IBM i" and you can do about anything with it, there's even a port of
node.js for example. It also has a binary compatible AIX subsystem which
integrates with the rest. You can even call it (from a programmer's
standpoint) - and it officially is - a UNIX system (POSIX compliant that is).
Etc. When you see a green screen you see old software, not an old system that
only supports green screens. And there are still more than 100.000 individual
customers/companies using this system. And lots and lots of old RPG code,
which only grows.

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kokey
Excellent, now I have somewhere to try out tetris for the AS/400

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welly
So, 2048 on AS/400?

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ljosa
Can someone give a guided tour to something cool that shows how different
AS/400 is from a Unix machine?

~~~
mschaef
One of the more unique aspects of the AS/400 is the single level store. I
haven't ever used it, but the general idea is that it does away with the file
system in exchange for a single, flat address space. This simplifies the
programming model.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-
level_store](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-level_store)

The AS/400 also runs something like bytecode, rather than directly on the
hardware. This has given IBM the flexibility to change the underlying
architecture in fairly radical ways. (new CPU ISAs, etc.)

Historically, the AS/400 has some significance to IBM beyond the fact that
it's been a commercial success. After IBM did so well with the System/360,
they started work on the next big thing: IBM Future System. The idea was that
FS was something only IBM could do, because only IBM had the research budget
and staff to pull it off. As these things often go, FS didn't achieve its
grander goals, but it did spin off several technologies that IBM did
commercialize. In addition to several System/370 processors, the Future System
work also ultimately resulted in the AS/400.

~~~
scholia
To be specific, the IBM Future System project was a failure, but the System/38
was one of the outcomes. Later the S/38 was renamed AS/400.

~~~
kps
AS/400 descended from S/38, but is not the same. In particular the System/38
architecture had capability-based addressing¹ — essentially, you can perform a
particular kind of access if and only if your pointer contains the necessary
permission.

¹Levy, Henry M. (1984). _Capability-based computer systems_.
[http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/index.html](http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/index.html)
Chapter 8 covers the IBM System/38.

~~~
scholia
"in June 1988, IBM announced the results of Silverlake as the Application
System/400, or AS/400\. In many ways, the box was a repackaging of the
System/38, with some left over Fort Knox parts,"

 _Brian Kelly was an IBM Midrange Systems Engineer for 30 years, and has spent
nearly a decade as a System i5 consultant based in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He
is also author of thirty AS /400, iSeries, and System i5 books and he serves
as an assistant professor at Marywood University, which uses the OS/400 and
i5/OS platform and teaches courses in the box as well._
[http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh040708-story05.html](http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh040708-story05.html)

My point was that the S/38 used some of the detritus from Fort Knox not,
directly, the AS/400.

Quite a lot of work went into the AS/400 so it wasn't just a renamed S/38, but
any discussion of the AS/400 should recognize its origins.

------
jdalton
The company I work for still uses an AS/400\. I hate it.

~~~
ceejayoz
I spent about a week as an AS/400 operator in-training (they hired me for an
available IT position while they worked on getting the real position created).
Training was basically a list of "press 3 at 10pm; press Z at 10:02pm; wait 15
minutes".

