10 ms·

I never used the i series (formerly AS/400, and System/38 before that), but reading Inside the AS/400 by Frank G. Soltis made a huge impression on me. Highly r

I never used the i series (formerly AS/400, and System/38 before that), but reading Inside the AS/400 by Frank G. Soltis made a huge impression on me. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the details.

anyfoo 4y ago
If you'd like to try, there is a way to get a free user account at pub400.com. That got me interested enough that I set out to get my own AS/400. It took me literally years until I stumbled upon an affordable machine with licenses. The machine I got is decades old and was decommissioned in 2008, after a long life. IBM created something revolutionary and did everything to keep the public away from it.
- chiph 4y ago
  The team behind it also tried to keep the rest of IBM away from it, for fear that The Suits From Armonk would come in and ruin their product and their culture.
whartung 4y ago
I kind of wished I would have got a position at some company to work on an AS/400. Back in the day, my company was looking for a new "solution" and considered most everything, including an IBM. But eventually we went UNIX. What I'm curious, though, is in the world of a random back office developer, how much of the, well, "inner beauty" of the machine would I have encountered. Most of the cool Unix-y stuff happened mostly through ad hoc integrations with random Stuff as circumstances presented themselves, and I don't know how much of the AS/400 a random (likely) COBOL programmer would have delved into.
- EdwardCoffin 4y ago
  My impression from reading the book was that it had a beautiful internal architecture that I imagined would largely be hidden from the user. I think as a say COBOL programmer on an AS/400, one would pretty much see it as not much different from say a mainframe. This opinion is entirely formed without experience though.
  - anyfoo 4y ago
    It's still very different from a developer/"system user" perspective (I don't say enduser because then you are kept away from most anyway). A lot of concepts one takes for granted are different.

anyfoo 4y ago

If you'd like to try, there is a way to get a free user account at pub400.com. That got me interested enough that I set out to get my own AS/400. It took me literally years until I stumbled upon an affordable machine with licenses. The machine I got is decades old and was decommissioned in 2008, after a long life. IBM created something revolutionary and did everything to keep the public away from it.

chiph 4y ago
The team behind it also tried to keep the rest of IBM away from it, for fear that The Suits From Armonk would come in and ruin their product and their culture.

whartung 4y ago

I kind of wished I would have got a position at some company to work on an AS/400. Back in the day, my company was looking for a new "solution" and considered most everything, including an IBM. But eventually we went UNIX. What I'm curious, though, is in the world of a random back office developer, how much of the, well, "inner beauty" of the machine would I have encountered. Most of the cool Unix-y stuff happened mostly through ad hoc integrations with random Stuff as circumstances presented themselves, and I don't know how much of the AS/400 a random (likely) COBOL programmer would have delved into.

EdwardCoffin 4y ago
My impression from reading the book was that it had a beautiful internal architecture that I imagined would largely be hidden from the user. I think as a say COBOL programmer on an AS/400, one would pretty much see it as not much different from say a mainframe. This opinion is entirely formed without experience though.
- anyfoo 4y ago
  It's still very different from a developer/"system user" perspective (I don't say enduser because then you are kept away from most anyway). A lot of concepts one takes for granted are different.