I began my programming career in 1997 with the IBM AS/400 and a Windows version of a 5250 terminal emulator. Setting up an intelligent colour scheme was conside

I began my programming career in 1997 with the IBM AS/400 and a Windows version of a 5250 terminal emulator. Setting up an intelligent colour scheme was considered a talking point at water towers. COBOL and RPG were the only two business compilers on it and DB/2 was stock. DB/2 kicked ass as it was one of the few RDBMSs at that time to allow new generation heretics like us to do in-line SQL directly in our COBOL and RPG "pgms". I still remember the animated discussion the older members of the team had arguing against direct SQL in the COBOL programs. "Rather stick to OPEN file, (sequentially) READ file, DO WHILE loops with NESTED IF statements to select your records into WORKING MEMORY. And don't forget to CLOSE the damn FILE!" I also fondly remember that all our compiles had to be done by exiting the editing screens and separately scheduling a BATCH job for the compile, and then reading the output of the BATCH job to see if your PGM compiled successfully. If not, you'd have to read the JOB LOGS to see where you committed syntax errors. No debugging at runtime, no IDEs. You had to read your own code top to bottom, scatter a few PRINT statements around (also viewed in the JOB LOGS) to see if your PGM worked at all. One of the many things that amazed me at that time (1997) was that AS/400 had a robust ODBC CLI for both Windows and OS/2 Warp. This allowed the pointy haired bosses to enjoy results of data warehouse projects directly from their Windows PCs using Microsoft Access (of all things). In Comic Sans fonts to boot! EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention - I still haven't seen documentation for systems, compilers and databases as useful, user-friendly and comprehensive as the manuals compiled, printed and bound by IBM. There was absolutely no need for Google. I will never be ashamed of that beginning. Never.