4 ms·
There are AS/400s that run inventory management type stuff in shops and warehouses that probably haven't been touched in 30-40 years. I'm serious, probably buri
by blantonl 4y ago
There are AS/400s that run inventory management type stuff in shops and warehouses that probably haven't been touched in 30-40 years. I'm serious, probably buried under 10 pounds of dust and grease and trash and papers and they just run - they are just sucking down electricity and pumping out data to 5250 terminals over cables.
Granted whatever is running on them could probably run on a Raspberry Pi, but the rewrite would be a 2 million dollar contract by IBM Global Services and the Raspberry Pi would die every 2 years.
- electroly 4y agoI'm curious how much is attributable to the hardware, how much is the software, and how much is simply the fact that no human ever touches it. In a previous life I worked at a CNC machining shop and we had an RS/6000. Everything you say about the AS/400 was also true about the RS/6000. It ran AIX and nobody ever had to think about it because it always worked. But AIX is vastly cheaper than IBM i, and they run on the same hardware now. I think it's worthwhile to examine whether IBM i is actually providing the stability or if it was the hardware + no human touching it the whole time.