On: On the strange joys of mainframe OSes that have su...

[trasz]

“Mini” is just a marketing name at this point. The “i” is just a POWER machine - a micro - running a weird operating system.

[rahen → trasz]

It's not even marketing since IBM doesn't use this terminology.

But i is still quite removed from the micro standards: POWER, EBCDIC, COBOL, RPG, 5250 terminals, and the SLIC/TIMI/LPAR abstractions.

The typical "micro" app would use x86, UTF-8, Java/C++/Rust/Go on top of a general public system like Linux.

Well at least both use 8 bits words, it hasn't always been the case.