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Satya Nadella uses an IBM AS/400 in 1993
- robertlagrant 3y ago> The AS/400 has (mostly) gone (partly replaced by Microsoft’s own Azure?) Er - no.
- klelatti 3y ago> Fair comment. I was thinking of the original AS/400 hardware but AS/400 is used to refer the later PowerPC versions (which I guess Nadella would have been using here) and IBMi.
- robertlagrant 3y agoI meant it's not replaced by Azure! :-)
- sillywalk 3y agoThe first PowerPC based AS/400e didn't come out until '95, so Satya would've been using the CISC IMPI versions.
- klelatti 3y agoThank you!
- mmcgaha 3y agoWe are replacing our 400 with Azure. We are moving to D365 F&O from the ERP that we have been running for the last thirty years. It is in the best interest for the company but I have to admit that I will be a little sad the day we power it down for the last time.
- patja 3y agoWhen I was there (part of the project), it all went to SAP R/3 on SQL Server and Windows. But I left in 2008 and I'm sure they have changed a few things since then :)
- NikkiA 3y agoHaving the monitor that low and tilted upwards was surely against all ergonomic guidelines, even then.
- jhoechtl 3y agoI guess it was arranged that way in order to give ample view on the presenter rather than the back of a bulky monitor.
- prmoustache 3y agoI noticed the 2 mouses. Now I understand why I had to switch to linux and BSDs. Nobody told me I needed 2 pointing devices to be happy on windows.
- ben7799 3y agoI'm not sure I ever saw a height adjustable monitor till LCD screens started appearing. My first desktop LCD was a Sony and did not height adjust. Some people had furniture that raised the monitor up. Other people had the monitor stacked on top of the computer itself, and the "stack of books" thing was around.
- Donaldzibe 3y ago[flagged]
- scaglio 3y ago> Thirty years later, a lot has changed. The AS/400 has (mostly) gone Well, not exactly. IBMi is still widely used, as an "affordable, low cost mainframe".
- klelatti 3y agoFair comment. I was thinking of the original AS/400 hardware but AS/400 is used to refer the later PowerPC versions (which I guess Nadella would have been using here) and IBMi.
- muragekibicho 3y agoSatya Nadella has hair in the picture. I really didn't expect that
- augustk 3y agoWhy do you expect a 26-year-old to be bald?
- krylon 3y agoI've met a few people who had a clearly visible bald spot at that age (including my father, fortunately I got my hair from my mother). Not many, but it happens.
- voxadam 3y agoIn his memoir, Making It So, Patrick Stewart (Jean-Luc Picard, Professor X, etc.) said that he was noticeably balding at 17 and was more or less completely bald by 19. Stewart may be an extreme case but a sizeable population of men lose a substantial amount of their hair before 26.
- Suppafly 3y agoyeah it's kinda weird that we associate baldness with age, most of the people that get it genetically seem to start balding at a young age. I have a friend that started losing it in his teens and had lost enough to constantly wear hats by college.
- NikolaNovak 3y agoSome are? :) I started balding early 20s but some of my friends in late teens.
- tr33house 3y agoIn 93, I was a baby. I'm now at least a Senior Eng in many orgs. It's impressive, at the very least, that Satya stayed in Microsoft that long
- vsnf 3y agoWhat's even more impressive than his tenure is his trajectory from sales grunt to CEO.
- TillE 3y agoI dunno exactly what a "technical marketing manager" is, but Nadella had a master's in computer science at that point, so I doubt he was just a sales guy.
- quonn 3y agoHaving these kind of roles with a strong technical background is typical for Microsoft. They have a parallel management and technical hierarchy all the way to the top. Everyone should copy this, so much talent is lost by good people going into management where they often aren't even that good.
- TMWNN 3y agoIt sounds like what a police officer described in an AMA; it's possible to move from uniform to plainclothes detective, or stay in uniform on patrol, for one's entire career without penalty to salary. <https://np.reddit.com/r/SouthLAndTV/comments/1di5yq/i_am_copwithoutvest_ama/c9qjxnf/?context=3 https://np.reddit.com/r/SouthLAndTV/comments/1di5yq/i_am_cop...>
- alephnerd 3y ago> I dunno exactly what a "technical marketing manager" is A TMM/TME is a hybrid role support role consisting of functions of a Dev Advocate, PM, and PMM. While PMM would own non-technical GTM and enablement, the TMM/TME would own technical GTM and enablement. It's an older role common in 90s era companies like Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, etc though is has been renamed as Technical Product Management now in most orgs (eg. Lacework, Netskope, etc)
- pjmlp 3y agoDuring 93's Summer, I was doing my technical school internship, which required among other duties, to start backup jobs on an AS/400.
- mulmen 3y agoI don’t have a lot of AS/400 experience but I have done my share of swearing at Excel. I’m curious to see the reverse demonstration. Move data from Excel to the AS/400 and see all the options that then become available.
- chasil 3y agoThere is a full instance of db2 inside it, so good SQL capabilities are certainly included.
- ThinkBeat 3y agoThe AS/400 was the most reliable server I have ever worked with. They tended to just work month after month. I am not saying it is the most reliable server in the world, because there are a lot I have not worked with, but it was far more reliable than anything else I have worked on. IF something did go wrong, they would at times call IBM and ask for service before the customer had any knowledge of an issue. My mother became the AS/400 sys admin at her company and she had no idea about servers or technical sides of computers. She changed the backup tapes on a schedule and that was it . Many places nobody knew where the box was since nobody interacted with it on a physical level. Green screen terminals or terminal apps on Windows was the norm. Some business had them for inventory / sales / accounting and so on. Many places nobody knew where the box was since nobody interacted with it on a physical level. Green screen terminals or terminal apps on Windows was the norm. There were a couple of simple games (not from IBM) you could download and play, but it wasn't worth it. There were some drawbacks, but Id love to have one to play with.
- chasil 3y agoThe modern "i" series machines are just POWER processors on a standard server. It's unlikely that anything under a 14nm process node is used for the CPU, if that. IBM has deep knowledge in high-availability systems, but it's unlikely that you could call these more advanced than a modern 5nm Ryzen server.
- saiya-jin 3y agoYou don't understand where AS-400 real power comes from. DB integrated directly into filesystem, you optimize your work for how the whole system has been designed and get massive benefits and robustness. Performance between junior basic code and heavily optimized complex queries even on just Oracle can be 1000x easily, just ask any data warehouse guy (seen it few times myself even though I don't do warehouses). You can maybe add another 0 for AS-400 there in extreme cases. Yes if you end up doing things wrong and expect that CPU to do some heavy math then yes this will be dusted quickly. Otherwise, not so much. But this goes against most modern 'SV principles' so I don't expect much love from younger generations here. Business love that though, and secretly wish all IT could be as reliable and predictable as them although that ship has sailed long time ago. One of those 'they don't do them like good old times anymore'.
- tm11zz 3y agoClearly this is another example of Sora in action
- ed_mercer 3y agoI wonder what the prompt was!
- bank_daddy 3y agoI supported core banking software and did some RPG II development on the AS/400 in the early 1990s. That system lives on in banking and has since been rebranded to iSeries and then Power (and the OS/400 operating system rebranded to "i"). Chances are if you bank in a community or regional bank, the core banking software is run on Power hardware. Long live the AS/400!
- Zobat 3y ago> No social distancing in 1993. No gender diversity either, though clearly not all middle aged white dudes. His daughter seeing this and wondering who that was, those things hurt.
- Koshkin 3y agoFor those who would like to experience an AS/400: https://pub400.com/ https://pub400.com/
- WorksOfBarry 3y agocombine that with [1] and you're set for development https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=HalcyonTechLtd.code-for-ibmi https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=HalcyonT...
- rootusrootus 3y agoIf you're really into it, there are usually a few on eBay. A few years back I almost picked one up for my dad as a fun gift; he worked for IBM for 25 years and much of the later years were focused on the AS/400. He spoke quite fondly of it.
- nxobject 3y agoI wonder what the licensing situation would be – especially if they'd wiped the disk. Although I'm now tempted to look that up...
- sillywalk 3y agoHere's a deep dive book on the architecture of the AS/400 up to the PowerPC port, written by Frank Soltis, one of the main people behind the system. https://archive.org/details/insideas4000000solt https://archive.org/details/insideas4000000solt
- ljoshua 3y agoWhat I find most interesting from this clip is that, if you just swapped out some of the product names and acronyms, it would largely sound like a technical presentation that could be given today. “Here’s a database, we want to connect it with SQL to another product for visualizing the data, and we’re going to add some automation to take care of business process X.” Surely things have gotten faster and (in some cases!) more efficient, but we are doing the same thing 30 years later that we were excited about in 1993. In a way that’s both comforting and darkly funny.
- duxup 3y agoChoosing software, prioritizing the right things, and connecting it all is hard. We're not good at it and we have to re-connect the dots every-time we shuffle the deck chairs. I think I've worked on the problem of "we want our sales guys to get an email whenever the sale they made ships" ... an un-countable amount of times. Without fail the first and biggest hurdle is that the customer does not reliably capture or connect their sales people's email addresses in any kind of reliable way. I'm sure they do when it comes to paying bonuses, but not for sending the email when the thing ships. It makes no sense, it should be easy, but they don't. So we work on it on and on and then with the next customer and so on. And honestly I'm not sure any of these sales folks read the dang email.
- StevePerkins 3y agoThe Mother of All Demos was given in 1968, and still warrants its moniker today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
- mdgrech23 3y agoI work in the auto industry. Cars have changed so much but at the end of the day they're still just internal combustion engines that spin wheels. I suppose EVs represent true innovation but I'm still dubious on their future.
- lizknope 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Type_51 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Type_51 > The 1916 Type 53 was the first car to use the same control layout as modern automobiles- with the gear lever and hand brake in the middle of the front two seats, a key started ignition, and three pedals for the clutch, brake and throttle in the modern order. I've seen a clip on Top Gear where they drove some early cars and the controls were completely different like levers for acceleration and braking. How long would it take someone familiar with this 108 year old Cadillac to learn how to drive a modern car from point A to point B? 1 minute?
- nsxwolf 3y agoDang I was not that smart when I was 26.
- tohnjitor 3y agoAS/400 is an awesome system.
- thehias 3y agoNice, I still do that in 2024!
- alchemist1e9 3y agoSingle color polo, white undershirt, khaki pants, leather walking shoes. It was the same at a lot of tech places throughout the 90s and I remember it well. I’m not sure how that style started or where, it might have come out of Microsoft and Seattle.
- steve1977 3y agoLol when I read the headline I was thinking "oh my this makes me remember Microsoft SNA Server" and sure enough that's what they were using...
- tiahura 3y agoTotal sidebar, but am I the only one who thinks his accent sounds odd?
- strikelaserclaw 3y agoHe sounds australian
- swozey 3y agoI'm always so impressed with how long MS is able to keep employees. I see so many 10-20+ year vets. I know a ton of people who have left and gone back as well. I think it's a very millennial thing but I've barely gone past 3 years somewhere. Half our careers our salaries were controlled by 2008 and you had to job hop to get more money.
- anshubansal2000 3y agoHe had hair :)
- jamal-kumar 3y agoThe program he uses as an ODBC tool to access the mainframe (StarSQL for Windows) still exists and as of 2020 even got an update [1] [1] https://docs.stelodata.com/Products/starsql/readme.html https://docs.stelodata.com/Products/starsql/readme.html
- schoen 3y agoI had a summer internship in high school with an AS/400 application development shop. I found the machine and its development environment annoying and unpleasant compared to Unix, but the support from IBM was incredible. Absurdly bureaucratic, but also so thorough and detailed and accessible. I still have this memory that IBM sent out an Engineering Change for the AS/400 that consisted of a twist tie to help customers who had purchased an Ethernet card for it coil their Ethernet cables more reliably. (The twist tie of course then having a specific IBM part number.) I would love to be able to substantiate this memory. IBM was also seemingly very open to supporting new technologies, both hardware and software, on the AS/400, including some that were invented decades after the machine was introduced. Usually for a fee, of course!
- easton 3y agoIBM lists a cable tie as a part for Power5 here: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/power5?topic=catalog-system-parts https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/power5?topic=catalog-system-part... I don't know if 9119-590 is compatible with AS/400 though.
- neilv 3y agoThat twist-tie ECO process sounds aerospace-grade. I saw things like that from IBM, just from their later Power AIX workstations. For mission-critical computing companies, there was lots of process intended not to have anything slip through the cracks. The first memory that comes to mind was actually DEC (or was it HP?), who, to send a single sheet of paper (e.g., for a license key), would routinely use an entire shipping box. Paper would be shrink-wrapped or poly-bagged, with a sheet of cardboard. Plus a packing list, itemizing not only that one sheet of paper, but also itemizing all the shipping supplies to be used. Not very efficient in some sense, but if it avoided a single mission-critical incident for a customer, I suppose it was worthwhile.
- euroderf 3y agoIt would certainly put a roomful of people on alert that something important was up. Making it harder to foul up.
- barbazoo 3y agoI've never worked directly with an AS/400. I do remember doing a school internship when I was 15 or so with our town's local IT shop and we went to a customer once and replaced the backup tapes. Still stuck in my head as something that was impressive at the time.
- t312227 3y agohello, in the 1980ties my system "of choice" was an atari st and my schools computer was a VAX 11/730 running VMS 4.x ... later 2 of them in a DECnet - had some fun with them :)) but a friend of mine was an admin for an IBM AS400 and out of curiosity i visited him from time to time and "looked him over his shoulder" as we say in german during updates and similar tasks ... was a nice and very stable system back then ... it had a small hdd - can't remeber its size - and the updates came on floppies with 8 inches if i remember it correctly ... 4 or 5 of them at a time - around 120 k each ... laughable by today's standards, but afaik pretty common for a small to medium sized business back then - a travel agency. cheers v.
- lvl102 3y agoI hate Microsoft but I respect Satya so much for what he accomplished.
- jasoneckert 3y agoMicrosoft had a lot of AS/400s when I worked there in 1993. I believe most of the core infrastructure ran on it. On my last day there before returning to Canada in August 1993, I vividly remember that Bill Gates had a general meeting where he was talking about how IBM was doing poorly and that he was thinking of buying it, but not the whole company, just the AS/400 division (obviously, that didn't happen).
- internet101010 3y agoI use AS/400 in 2024, though not that much anymore because we only have a few things left in there that haven't been migrated. What we have gone to is less reliable and getting data out of it is always a herculean effort that requires a bunch of service tickets and meetings. One of the great features of AS/400 is I think shift+esc, which allows you to quickly view the list of tables (or files as they call them) that are being used to populate the current screen. This should be a standard function for Tableau/Power BI workbooks that have live database connections. I have a love-hate relationship with it. It's like an old pickup with 1M miles that refuses to die.
- ako 3y agoHow do you use that info? Validate that it’s using the correct data, or as info when writing a new app? I often wished I had the same when building something on top of sap/salesforce/any other app that would show the source of every field on a page, ideally also showing the api that would give that data.
- internet101010 3y agoWhen people say "I want the <insert metric> from G42" with G42 being a certain screen, it's helpful to be able to quickly see what all is populating that screen. It's not exact but over the course of 30 years a lot of tables can get created and 7-8 character limits on table and field names doesn't help. I am not sure if it is a requirement when creating a table to have descriptions but they are all there in my org. So go to the screen to get the tables and then join it with a "give me the list of all tables, table descriptions, columns, column descriptions" SQL query. EZ. After seeing how useful these descriptions are, I firmly believe that every organization should make them a requirement even if the rdb itself does not. Just simple form of documentation at time of creation that allows for context while still giving you the ability to enforce rigid naming structures.
- KMag 3y agoI was surprised Sun/Oracle's JVM (or Apple, after their 3rd architecture migration) never took a page from AS/400's TIMI (Technology Independent Machine Interface) and compile an architecture-independent representation to native code at installation time. As the Android Runtime later demonstrated, nothing prevents you from distributing an architecture-independent representation, AoT-compiling to native code at installation time, instrumenting the native code, and then re-optimizing at runtime and/or in a background batch process if your instrumentation statistics deviate substantially from what was available the last time you re-optimized. Apart from the extra disk space for both bytecode and native representations, something like TIMI allows for the best of both worlds as far as AoT and JIT. (It's also nice that TIMI doesn't require a garbage collector to be running.) I'm not aware of modern AS/400 dynamically re-optimizing binaries, but doing so wouldn't break anything. Given the conservative nature of mainframe users, I imagine dynamic re-compilation would need to be an opt-in feature.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- RandallBrown 3y agoIf I'm understanding correctly, Apple actually did do something similar with Bitcode. The developer would submit one app as serialized LLVM intermediate representation, then Apple would recompile it and serve the correct version for your architecture in the App Store.
- skissane 3y ago> I was surprised Sun/Oracle's JVM (or Apple, after their 3rd architecture migration) never took a page from AS/400's TIMI (Technology Independent Machine Interface) and compile an architecture-independent representation to native code at installation time. GraalVM supports AOT compilation – https://www.graalvm.org/latest/reference-manual/native-image/ https://www.graalvm.org/latest/reference-manual/native-image... But, I think "TIMI" has significantly less value today than it once did. Due to PASE (the AIX compatibility environment), there is ever more code on contemporary IBM i systems which runs outside of the MI bytecode layer. Shifting IBM i to something other than POWER would require recompiling all that code from source.
- cedws 3y agoWow, really unique accent he had back then. It's like a mix of British and American with a slight bit of Indian.
- ed_mercer 3y agoNot sure it has improved much after all those years
- Freedomboy 3y ago[dead]
- arnavpraneet 3y agoThis makes him look like a recent college grad damn