7 ms·

Pub400.com – Your public IBM I 7.5 server

108 points by omnibrain 4y ago

rainmong 4y ago
What would you use this for? I don't understand what advantages the AS/400 has over other machines.
- ianai 4y ago
  Probably the most obvious is your business has a business application that runs on it. Hospitality stuff and financial stuff runs on it. This stuff allowed companies to do offsite failover reliably and with a pool of “certified professionals” before much modern tech took hold. Nowadays probably applications which really need reliability and uptime would benefit the most. Logistics stuff where you really need a central source of truth. Etc. Or you’re the kind of programmer who wants a system that treats objects as full first class objects.
  - skissane 4y ago
    > Or you’re the kind of programmer who wants a system that treats objects as full first class objects. Something which AS/400 (now renamed IBM i) has never provided. People who’ve never studied it in detail get led astray by the “object-oriented” marketing hype into thinking it is something like Smalltalk-it ain’t. Imagine a form of “OO” in which all classes (“object types”) were defined by the OS vendor and end-users or third party developers lacked the power to create new classes, they could only create instances of those defined by the OS vendor. And in which there is no real notion of inheritance-except for adhoc approximations to it, such as “type” fields in certain classes. That’s what “OO” means in OS/400.
    - ianai 4y ago
      It’s weird for sure. I was trying to give a best pitch based on my experiences and what engineers have told me over the years with an eye towards the HN audience. But they clearly could grow their pool of talent by opening up some.
      - skissane 4y ago
        Its “object” system was designed in the 1970s, as part of System/38. They decided to impose some limitations on generality - no inheritance, only IBM could define new classes. That could have been a justifiable engineering decision at the time, especially given how new OO was, and the fact that their design was already rather challenging given the limits of 1970s technology (and the market positioning of a “midrange” price point). And maybe they originally intended to lift those limitations - but it never happened. And AS/400 (and now IBM i) was essentially “version 2” of System/38, with incompatible changes, but changes which were modest rather than expansive (e.g. increasing maximum object name length from 8 to 10 - I wonder why they bothered with such a small increase, why not 16 or 32?)
        somat 4y ago
        wild ass guess, they had two tag bytes(is the as/400 even a byte machine, perhaps it would be better to say two tag words) reserved and decided that they were never going to use them and it was a fairly trivial and safe update to merge them into the name field.
        skissane 4y ago
        Turns out I'd garbled things in my memory. There was no change in max object name length from S/38 to AS/400 – both were 10 characters max. The change was actually from S/36 to AS/400, which went from 8 to 10 – but AS/400 is not a direct descendant of S/36, only of S/38. Apologies for the misinformation. The biggest incompatibility between S/38 and AS/400 is still in the object name syntax, but not in the maximum length – rather, in how qualified names are written. In S/38, a qualified object name is of the form OBJECT.LIBRARY, whereas AS/400 changes it to LIBRARY/OBJECT. (A "library" is essentially what other platforms call a "directory", except it doesn't just contain files, actually any kind of object; and, there is no hierarchy, libraries cannot be nested – except for the special system library QSYS, which contains every other library). The change in the separator from . to / was necessary for S/36 compatibility - unlike S/38, S/36 allowed dots in names, so for S/36 compatibility, dot was added to the allowed characters in object names. This meant dot could no longer be used to separate the object and library in a qualified name, so slash was used instead. The reversal of the order was not strictly necessary, but was likely motivated by the fact that it is more consistent with what most other major operating systems do (MVS dataset names; paths on Unix, DOS, OS/2 and Windows; OpenVMS; among others).
  - igouy 4y ago
    > Or you’re the kind of programmer who wants a system that treats objects as full first class objects. "Rekursiv: an object-oriented cpu" November 1988 Byte 13(12) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/243546728_Rekursiv_an_object-_oriented_cpu https://www.researchgate.net/publication/243546728_Rekursiv_...
- layer8 4y ago
  There seems to be a campaign going to get a younger generation interested in programming for legacy IBM architectures and mainframes, maybe because they desperately need new blood to keep those systems going.
  - ianai 4y ago
    Probably the smartest thing IBM could do there is lower the cost to learn. They’ve kind of made their own problem by placing their knowledge behind expensive certification programs (last I knew). Such companies though may need to up their salaries significantly. Pay is ultimately the reason show up to work.
    - alfiedotwtf 4y ago
      This. IBM needs an emulator you can download and play with. I've always wanted to play with AS/400 but had no access to a non-production environment so why bother learning
      - ianai 4y ago
        I thought you could buy old models off eBay like anything else? Though I’m guessing the software is still locked up.
        alfiedotwtf 4y ago
        Maybe I'm wrong, but I was always under the impression that the AS/400 boxes at work needed 3-phase power?
        racingmars 4y ago
        The ones I've seen don't, no. The AS/400 boxes were pretty much designed for small-to-medium-sized businesses to stick in a closet and forget about. You may be thinking of IBM mainframes, which typically require three-phase power, but can be convinced to work without it. These days (and for quite a while), the boxes that run IBM i are the same POWER servers that can run AIX and Linux. Before the platforms consolidated, they were still POWER servers, it was just a different firmware between the "i Series" (ran OS/400) and "p Series" (ran AIX and Linux) POWER boxes.
- popularonion 4y ago
  When it came out 34 years ago, it was a shockingly modern (though completely TUI-based) development platform for what these days we call CRUD apps. I worked with AS/400s in the mid-2000s. I don't regret my time with it, but doom was on everyone's lips even back then. The main use case of the system was replaced by J2EE in big corps, and LAMP stacks everywhere else. IBM didn't particularly see this as a problem, since the WebSphere (J2EE) brand was doing fine. As I recall, IBM's plan for the future of the ecosystem was basically to push training courses in community colleges. Probably they assumed it pointless to compete for the same pool of developers who would bolt to Facebook or Google as soon as they could get an offer.
- INTPenis 4y ago
  This is just a personal perspective but all my experience with AS/400 tells me it's a huge scam. I first encountered them working in a call center and we got a new client that did travel booking so we had to order in a bunch of as/400 systems, and training for the agents so they could handle them. 2nd experience was at a consultancy firm where we had to hire in an external consultant to work with as/400 systems. When I finally got to see what these as/400 systems did I was convinced this is a scam. IBM and Big Travel are in bed together to keep this system alive and to keep people buying it and hiring consultants who are certified in it. Of course the certifications probably come from IBM too. I've seen WFH travel people who have a modern GUI to the AS/400 running on Windows, but it's still the as/400 TUI inside a modern GUI. What a fucking waste of time to make that wrapper. This is an API that desperately needs replacing and modernizing. The fact that it's still not replaced by a better system, and people insist on creating crazy wrappers for it, tells me that someone is putting the breaks on. Maybe it's tied to the international flights industry too, maybe that's where the modernization needs to happen. Either way as a modern developer I see absolutely no reason to keep clinging to this outdated system.
  - markphip 4y ago
    I spent first 15 years of my career at an AS/400 ISV. It is a great system ... for certain things. I doubt you ordered a "bunch of AS/400's" that is not how it worked and the smallest systems still cost 6 figures. You probably had 1 and you bought a bunch of terminals or something. The AS/400 has always had to fight for its survival inside IBM because it never drove a lot of the services revenue IBM was trying to grow in the 90's. The AS/400 was famous for being stuck in a closet and running non-stop with maybe a single employee that managed it. It did not sell a lot of IBM consulting and services. IBM mainly sells it via "Business Partners" so there is probably some ISV in the Travel industry that wrote an application that a lot of people used and they are the one selling AS/400's on behalf of IBM to customers that want to use their application. IBM never made it very easy for developers to learn and support the system on their own. They are too expensive for someone to buy a small one to learn on and the cloud option just did not exist. About all IBM did to help was offer attractive lease options so that companies like mine could afford to have systems to develop our software on. That said in the early 90's we had to spend over 100K just to buy the tape drives necessary to make "copies" of our software to send to customers. So a customer wants to try our software we have to copy our software on to a tape that probably costs $25+ and then FedEx it to them along with a bunch of heavy 3-ring binders of documentation. It is amazing things ever worked out back then and we survived. Anyway, I often miss the AS/400. Writing RPG to do transaction processing against DB2/400 always seemed a lot cleaner and more straight forward than SQL and other languages. It also became possible to write real GUI applications though most took the path you described. We rewrote our UI using Eclipse and Java (we were a developer tool). The Java UI talked to the backend API that was still running RPG and ran on the AS/400. I've been gone for 17 years but all that code is still running today.
- gjvc 4y ago
  This is a good summary ... from 1992 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pY6Xxptp9A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pY6Xxptp9A
- fweimer 4y ago
  It's got an interesting C implementation. It might be helpful to play with it for a bit if you are working on a memory-safe C variant, for example. Casting Pointers https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/ssw_ibm_i_74/rzarh/aconv.htm https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/ssw_ibm_i_74/rzarh/aconv.htm
MikeYasnev007 4y ago
MikeYasnev007 4y ago
usr1106 4y ago
Looks like it has been running for 20 years and is community operated? From the headline I misinterpreted this to be a commercial cloud. I used VAX/VMS and VM370/CMS in the 80s. I have fond memories of VAX/VMS and still log in to the machine at the computer museum to play dungeon. Would also program Lisp or so, but have not figured out how to transfer files. For IBM my feelings are more mixed. The VM side was certainly what the rest of the world got only 30 years later. The CMS side felt already a bit obsolete then when you could run X11 on a Sun. Have never used AS/400, but from all what I have heard it is horrible even compared to CMS.
- racingmars 4y ago
  > ...and is community operated? From the headline I misinterpreted this to be a commercial cloud. I think this is run by a company that does offer commercial AS/400 instances, but they also provide free non-commercial accounts on this one box. Which is nice because it's not trivial to get your hands on your own system as a hobbyist. > Have never used AS/400, but from all what I have heard it is horrible even compared to CMS. I wouldn't say it's horrible compared to CMS. It's just _very_ different. I have played with quite a few operating systems...it's a bit of a hobby of mine... and OS/400 is the most different. In terms of writing simple terminal-oriented forms applications to do basic CRUD operations against a relational database, OS/400 is actually pretty nice. It's just such a WEIRD system. The thing I find frustrating about it is that while it has a lot of interesting security controls, the defaults are wide open and I suspect there aren't a lot of people who could secure it to the point where you could give untrusted users "shell" access and not worry you've left some little nook or cranny open to them that you didn't mean to. [Presumably at least one of those people are involved with the pub400.com system!]
  - neurostimulant 4y ago
    I was working for a client that uses AS/400 a few years ago. They exposed an API for their internal application as an FTP service, which really blow my mind. I guess it's quite similar with REST API in many ways. Is it common to do that in AS/400 land? Now that I think about it, SWIFT is also an FTP-based API service, right?
graderjs 4y ago
I signed up. I want to learn cobol and understand this system
cube00 4y ago
It's disappointing you can't even read the forum without an account, no wonder search results are getting worse.
- indigodaddy 4y ago
  I was actually somehow pleased when I noticed the same thing— not exactly sure why..
barrettotte 4y ago
If you want to learn IBM i with a modern IDE, you can actually use VS Code with https://github.com/halcyon-tech/vscode-ibmi https://github.com/halcyon-tech/vscode-ibmi. I also made a subpar guide to getting started on IBM i with RPGLE at https://barrettotte.github.io/IBMi-Book https://barrettotte.github.io/IBMi-Book. Its a really fun language/environment and I recommend anyone take a try at coding something trivial.

108 points by omnibrain 4y ago

rainmong 4y ago

What would you use this for? I don't understand what advantages the AS/400 has over other machines.

ianai 4y ago
Probably the most obvious is your business has a business application that runs on it. Hospitality stuff and financial stuff runs on it. This stuff allowed companies to do offsite failover reliably and with a pool of “certified professionals” before much modern tech took hold. Nowadays probably applications which really need reliability and uptime would benefit the most. Logistics stuff where you really need a central source of truth. Etc. Or you’re the kind of programmer who wants a system that treats objects as full first class objects.
- skissane 4y ago
  > Or you’re the kind of programmer who wants a system that treats objects as full first class objects. Something which AS/400 (now renamed IBM i) has never provided. People who’ve never studied it in detail get led astray by the “object-oriented” marketing hype into thinking it is something like Smalltalk-it ain’t. Imagine a form of “OO” in which all classes (“object types”) were defined by the OS vendor and end-users or third party developers lacked the power to create new classes, they could only create instances of those defined by the OS vendor. And in which there is no real notion of inheritance-except for adhoc approximations to it, such as “type” fields in certain classes. That’s what “OO” means in OS/400.
  - ianai 4y ago
    It’s weird for sure. I was trying to give a best pitch based on my experiences and what engineers have told me over the years with an eye towards the HN audience. But they clearly could grow their pool of talent by opening up some.
    - skissane 4y ago
      Its “object” system was designed in the 1970s, as part of System/38. They decided to impose some limitations on generality - no inheritance, only IBM could define new classes. That could have been a justifiable engineering decision at the time, especially given how new OO was, and the fact that their design was already rather challenging given the limits of 1970s technology (and the market positioning of a “midrange” price point). And maybe they originally intended to lift those limitations - but it never happened. And AS/400 (and now IBM i) was essentially “version 2” of System/38, with incompatible changes, but changes which were modest rather than expansive (e.g. increasing maximum object name length from 8 to 10 - I wonder why they bothered with such a small increase, why not 16 or 32?)
      - somat 4y ago
        wild ass guess, they had two tag bytes(is the as/400 even a byte machine, perhaps it would be better to say two tag words) reserved and decided that they were never going to use them and it was a fairly trivial and safe update to merge them into the name field.
        skissane 4y ago
        Turns out I'd garbled things in my memory. There was no change in max object name length from S/38 to AS/400 – both were 10 characters max. The change was actually from S/36 to AS/400, which went from 8 to 10 – but AS/400 is not a direct descendant of S/36, only of S/38. Apologies for the misinformation. The biggest incompatibility between S/38 and AS/400 is still in the object name syntax, but not in the maximum length – rather, in how qualified names are written. In S/38, a qualified object name is of the form OBJECT.LIBRARY, whereas AS/400 changes it to LIBRARY/OBJECT. (A "library" is essentially what other platforms call a "directory", except it doesn't just contain files, actually any kind of object; and, there is no hierarchy, libraries cannot be nested – except for the special system library QSYS, which contains every other library). The change in the separator from . to / was necessary for S/36 compatibility - unlike S/38, S/36 allowed dots in names, so for S/36 compatibility, dot was added to the allowed characters in object names. This meant dot could no longer be used to separate the object and library in a qualified name, so slash was used instead. The reversal of the order was not strictly necessary, but was likely motivated by the fact that it is more consistent with what most other major operating systems do (MVS dataset names; paths on Unix, DOS, OS/2 and Windows; OpenVMS; among others).
- igouy 4y ago
  > Or you’re the kind of programmer who wants a system that treats objects as full first class objects. "Rekursiv: an object-oriented cpu" November 1988 Byte 13(12) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/243546728_Rekursiv_an_object-_oriented_cpu https://www.researchgate.net/publication/243546728_Rekursiv_...
layer8 4y ago
There seems to be a campaign going to get a younger generation interested in programming for legacy IBM architectures and mainframes, maybe because they desperately need new blood to keep those systems going.
- ianai 4y ago
  Probably the smartest thing IBM could do there is lower the cost to learn. They’ve kind of made their own problem by placing their knowledge behind expensive certification programs (last I knew). Such companies though may need to up their salaries significantly. Pay is ultimately the reason show up to work.
  - alfiedotwtf 4y ago
    This. IBM needs an emulator you can download and play with. I've always wanted to play with AS/400 but had no access to a non-production environment so why bother learning
    - ianai 4y ago
      I thought you could buy old models off eBay like anything else? Though I’m guessing the software is still locked up.
      - alfiedotwtf 4y ago
        Maybe I'm wrong, but I was always under the impression that the AS/400 boxes at work needed 3-phase power?
        racingmars 4y ago
        The ones I've seen don't, no. The AS/400 boxes were pretty much designed for small-to-medium-sized businesses to stick in a closet and forget about. You may be thinking of IBM mainframes, which typically require three-phase power, but can be convinced to work without it. These days (and for quite a while), the boxes that run IBM i are the same POWER servers that can run AIX and Linux. Before the platforms consolidated, they were still POWER servers, it was just a different firmware between the "i Series" (ran OS/400) and "p Series" (ran AIX and Linux) POWER boxes.
popularonion 4y ago
When it came out 34 years ago, it was a shockingly modern (though completely TUI-based) development platform for what these days we call CRUD apps. I worked with AS/400s in the mid-2000s. I don't regret my time with it, but doom was on everyone's lips even back then. The main use case of the system was replaced by J2EE in big corps, and LAMP stacks everywhere else. IBM didn't particularly see this as a problem, since the WebSphere (J2EE) brand was doing fine. As I recall, IBM's plan for the future of the ecosystem was basically to push training courses in community colleges. Probably they assumed it pointless to compete for the same pool of developers who would bolt to Facebook or Google as soon as they could get an offer.
INTPenis 4y ago
This is just a personal perspective but all my experience with AS/400 tells me it's a huge scam. I first encountered them working in a call center and we got a new client that did travel booking so we had to order in a bunch of as/400 systems, and training for the agents so they could handle them. 2nd experience was at a consultancy firm where we had to hire in an external consultant to work with as/400 systems. When I finally got to see what these as/400 systems did I was convinced this is a scam. IBM and Big Travel are in bed together to keep this system alive and to keep people buying it and hiring consultants who are certified in it. Of course the certifications probably come from IBM too. I've seen WFH travel people who have a modern GUI to the AS/400 running on Windows, but it's still the as/400 TUI inside a modern GUI. What a fucking waste of time to make that wrapper. This is an API that desperately needs replacing and modernizing. The fact that it's still not replaced by a better system, and people insist on creating crazy wrappers for it, tells me that someone is putting the breaks on. Maybe it's tied to the international flights industry too, maybe that's where the modernization needs to happen. Either way as a modern developer I see absolutely no reason to keep clinging to this outdated system.
- markphip 4y ago
  I spent first 15 years of my career at an AS/400 ISV. It is a great system ... for certain things. I doubt you ordered a "bunch of AS/400's" that is not how it worked and the smallest systems still cost 6 figures. You probably had 1 and you bought a bunch of terminals or something. The AS/400 has always had to fight for its survival inside IBM because it never drove a lot of the services revenue IBM was trying to grow in the 90's. The AS/400 was famous for being stuck in a closet and running non-stop with maybe a single employee that managed it. It did not sell a lot of IBM consulting and services. IBM mainly sells it via "Business Partners" so there is probably some ISV in the Travel industry that wrote an application that a lot of people used and they are the one selling AS/400's on behalf of IBM to customers that want to use their application. IBM never made it very easy for developers to learn and support the system on their own. They are too expensive for someone to buy a small one to learn on and the cloud option just did not exist. About all IBM did to help was offer attractive lease options so that companies like mine could afford to have systems to develop our software on. That said in the early 90's we had to spend over 100K just to buy the tape drives necessary to make "copies" of our software to send to customers. So a customer wants to try our software we have to copy our software on to a tape that probably costs $25+ and then FedEx it to them along with a bunch of heavy 3-ring binders of documentation. It is amazing things ever worked out back then and we survived. Anyway, I often miss the AS/400. Writing RPG to do transaction processing against DB2/400 always seemed a lot cleaner and more straight forward than SQL and other languages. It also became possible to write real GUI applications though most took the path you described. We rewrote our UI using Eclipse and Java (we were a developer tool). The Java UI talked to the backend API that was still running RPG and ran on the AS/400. I've been gone for 17 years but all that code is still running today.
gjvc 4y ago
This is a good summary ... from 1992 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pY6Xxptp9A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pY6Xxptp9A
fweimer 4y ago
It's got an interesting C implementation. It might be helpful to play with it for a bit if you are working on a memory-safe C variant, for example. Casting Pointers https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/ssw_ibm_i_74/rzarh/aconv.htm https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/ssw_ibm_i_74/rzarh/aconv.htm

MikeYasnev007 4y ago

usr1106 4y ago

Looks like it has been running for 20 years and is community operated? From the headline I misinterpreted this to be a commercial cloud. I used VAX/VMS and VM370/CMS in the 80s. I have fond memories of VAX/VMS and still log in to the machine at the computer museum to play dungeon. Would also program Lisp or so, but have not figured out how to transfer files. For IBM my feelings are more mixed. The VM side was certainly what the rest of the world got only 30 years later. The CMS side felt already a bit obsolete then when you could run X11 on a Sun. Have never used AS/400, but from all what I have heard it is horrible even compared to CMS.

racingmars 4y ago
> ...and is community operated? From the headline I misinterpreted this to be a commercial cloud. I think this is run by a company that does offer commercial AS/400 instances, but they also provide free non-commercial accounts on this one box. Which is nice because it's not trivial to get your hands on your own system as a hobbyist. > Have never used AS/400, but from all what I have heard it is horrible even compared to CMS. I wouldn't say it's horrible compared to CMS. It's just _very_ different. I have played with quite a few operating systems...it's a bit of a hobby of mine... and OS/400 is the most different. In terms of writing simple terminal-oriented forms applications to do basic CRUD operations against a relational database, OS/400 is actually pretty nice. It's just such a WEIRD system. The thing I find frustrating about it is that while it has a lot of interesting security controls, the defaults are wide open and I suspect there aren't a lot of people who could secure it to the point where you could give untrusted users "shell" access and not worry you've left some little nook or cranny open to them that you didn't mean to. [Presumably at least one of those people are involved with the pub400.com system!]
- neurostimulant 4y ago
  I was working for a client that uses AS/400 a few years ago. They exposed an API for their internal application as an FTP service, which really blow my mind. I guess it's quite similar with REST API in many ways. Is it common to do that in AS/400 land? Now that I think about it, SWIFT is also an FTP-based API service, right?

graderjs 4y ago

I signed up. I want to learn cobol and understand this system

cube00 4y ago

It's disappointing you can't even read the forum without an account, no wonder search results are getting worse.

indigodaddy 4y ago
I was actually somehow pleased when I noticed the same thing— not exactly sure why..

barrettotte 4y ago

If you want to learn IBM i with a modern IDE, you can actually use VS Code with https://github.com/halcyon-tech/vscode-ibmi https://github.com/halcyon-tech/vscode-ibmi. I also made a subpar guide to getting started on IBM i with RPGLE at https://barrettotte.github.io/IBMi-Book https://barrettotte.github.io/IBMi-Book. Its a really fun language/environment and I recommend anyone take a try at coding something trivial.