7 ms·

Welcome to the public AS/400

73 points by omnibrain 12y ago

kev009 12y ago
If you're into operating systems design I defiantly recommend buying and reading through http://www.amazon.com/Fortress-Rochester-Inside-Story-iSeries/dp/1583040838 http://www.amazon.com/Fortress-Rochester-Inside-Story-iSerie.... The i OS is very different than UNIX and this book was quite enlightening to me. Some of the stuff done is quite visionary. The hardware micro-architecture has fundamentally changed four times, but the upper OS and users doesn't care.
- peterfirefly 12y ago
  Really, in spite of everything?
  - bdg 12y ago
    Care to add some substance to your question?
    - beagle3 12y ago
      That was his way to say " you meant definitely but wrote defiantly "
- twoodfin 12y ago
  That looks great, too bad it's currently $80 used! I really enjoyed Soltis' more formal "Inside the AS/400"[1], available for a mere 77¢! [1] http://smile.amazon.com/Inside-AS-400-Frank-Soltis/dp/1882419669/ http://smile.amazon.com/Inside-AS-400-Frank-Soltis/dp/188241...
  - kps 12y ago
    According to one of the reviews, it's the same book.
  - jgalt212 12y ago
    This is the second edition.
cake 12y ago
Wow no idea why someone would need that, I have to work with an AS/400 and let me tell you it's no fun !
- deleted 12y ago
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- lotsofcows 12y ago
  I worked on AS/400 for quite a while. Really enjoyed it. Updating old RPG terminal based code to Java web based stuff was interesting. Simple CRUD interfaces port easily. And once you're running Java stuff on OS/400 it's also easy to port to the linux environment. And from there is just an argument over databases to bye-bye proprietary hardware.
  - cake 12y ago
    That's my experience too, it's mostly basic CRUD interfaces. People say it's fast but that's because it gives you the most barebones user-hostile interface you could have. The company paid IBM $100k to upgrade a single server and this shit is locked with licences for cores and memory. It's not even that fast. The problem is they are too deep in it now but this shit needs to die.
NicoJuicy 12y ago
Ugh, i remember working on an AS 400 at school. I hated that and if i'm not mistaking, there wasn't support no more, when we had to learn it :-s I suppose those jobs earn well (think of AS 400 as watching the Matrix in code (black screen, green letters) and Neo is losing the fight )
- colanderman 12y ago
  No, they don't, because it's a buyer's market. (My dad is an AS/400 programmer. There's a lot of competition and not much work.)
  - whattssonn 12y ago
    It depends. If you have only traditional RPG/400 etc experience there are 10 programmers for each job, yes. But, in this marketplace, if you have experience with (traditional) RPG but also modern techniques like OO, Java, etc, you have lots of work for the coming decennia i assure you. These systems don't disappear, but they do have to be "modernized" and refitted to accommodate the changing environment. There is demand for it, but business do not know it's a modern system for which you can build modern software. The traditional RPG programmer will say something like "well XML and web services etc is too difficult, let's just use CSV and FTP like always". These days it's called "IBM i" and you can do about anything with it, there's even a port of node.js for example. It also has a binary compatible AIX subsystem which integrates with the rest. You can even call it (from a programmer's standpoint) - and it officially is - a UNIX system (POSIX compliant that is). Etc. When you see a green screen you see old software, not an old system that only supports green screens. And there are still more than 100.000 individual customers/companies using this system. And lots and lots of old RPG code, which only grows.
kokey 12y ago
Excellent, now I have somewhere to try out tetris for the AS/400
welly 12y ago
So, 2048 on AS/400?
ljosa 12y ago
Can someone give a guided tour to something cool that shows how different AS/400 is from a Unix machine?
- mschaef 12y ago
  One of the more unique aspects of the AS/400 is the single level store. I haven't ever used it, but the general idea is that it does away with the file system in exchange for a single, flat address space. This simplifies the programming model. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-level_store http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-level_store The AS/400 also runs something like bytecode, rather than directly on the hardware. This has given IBM the flexibility to change the underlying architecture in fairly radical ways. (new CPU ISAs, etc.) Historically, the AS/400 has some significance to IBM beyond the fact that it's been a commercial success. After IBM did so well with the System/360, they started work on the next big thing: IBM Future System. The idea was that FS was something only IBM could do, because only IBM had the research budget and staff to pull it off. As these things often go, FS didn't achieve its grander goals, but it did spin off several technologies that IBM did commercialize. In addition to several System/370 processors, the Future System work also ultimately resulted in the AS/400.
  - scholia 12y ago
    To be specific, the IBM Future System project was a failure, but the System/38 was one of the outcomes. Later the S/38 was renamed AS/400.
    - kps 12y ago
      AS/400 descended from S/38, but is not the same. In particular the System/38 architecture had capability-based addressing¹ — essentially, you can perform a particular kind of access if and only if your pointer contains the necessary permission. ¹Levy, Henry M. (1984). Capability-based computer systems. http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/index.html http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/index.html Chapter 8 covers the IBM System/38.
morganvachon 12y ago
Well this brings back memories. I took an AS/400 class in college (local tech school) since that was the only way to learn SQL back then; none of the other CIS classes offered database programming. The class was geared towards prepping the student for working at one of two companies in the area that hired AS/400 programmers, so it was very narrowly focused to their needs. I have to say, that was a simultaneously challenging and frustrating experience. It soured me on being a programmer of any sort, and I ended up shifting to network administration as a field of study. I'm glad I did. All that said, this seems like a generous and handy service for those who need it.
bdg 12y ago
I'm happy to see this. I'm only in my 20s so I haven't grown up with mainframe computing in my life, but I did get to use both an AS/400 and z/OS about 5 years ago. I've been tweeting and emailing into the dark asking IBM to just provide a free VM of one of these so I can at least play around and learn about them more. I was just getting into assembly on one when I lost access.
- craigching 12y ago
  You mean like this? http://www.hercules-390.org/ http://www.hercules-390.org/ EDIT: Sorry, that's a link to an OS/390 VM, not AS/400. That was how I originally read your post, that you wanted a z/OS VM to play with. But, it's a useful link nonetheless ;)
- Alupis 12y ago
  Having had the privilege of working with 2 different AS/400 systems (one a v4 and another a v6), I can say these guys are really bullet proof. Rarely are the OS level issues -- almost all of our issues have been hardware (hdd's failing, not surprising though), or our vendor app messing up (too frequent to be happy about, but hey, it's written in RPG V, so can't complain too much). The problem with learning to work with an AS/400 system is that they are ludicrously expensive to get your hands on -- So I am very glad to see something like this out there in the wild.
mikelbring 12y ago
We used one of these at my old job, well the IMB iSeries but the database was started in the early 80s. Fun times, all the employees where still on green screen when I was there (2011-2012). We started to move everyone to a web application that accessed the AS/400 data.
jdalton 12y ago
The company I work for still uses an AS/400. I hate it.
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  I spent about a week as an AS/400 operator in-training (they hired me for an available IT position while they worked on getting the real position created). Training was basically a list of "press 3 at 10pm; press Z at 10:02pm; wait 15 minutes".
drakaal 12y ago
There is still great pay if you are an AS/400 guru. About 3 years ago I interviewed for a job where I would be maintaining code which was running on an AS/400 running in System 36 emulation mode. The code had been certified by the government for a 50 year contract. The 3 previous employees had all died. Which didn't make me anxious to take the job, but the pay was $450k a year. And with job security through 2030 it had some appeal. But what do you do after? "I have experience with 50 year old software" is kind of like the resumes people send me saying they know Office XP and Word Perfect. Sure if you can fix the things nobody else can you can charge top dollar, but eventually the last of those things come out of service.
- dodders 12y ago
  In 2006, Gartner estimated there were still 180 billion lines of COBOL code running in production [1]. I don't believe a significant proportion will have been retired since. Languages never die - they just keep running... [1] http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9004821/Cobol_The_New_Latin http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9004821/Cobol_The_New...
  - drakaal 12y ago
    RPG has a significantly lower install base, and I would say it is mostly dead.
- Ecio78 12y ago
  Do you really need to do something "after" if you earn 450k$/yr for few years? In an ideal work I'll probably take that job, ask for 80% part-time and use the remaining 20% of the time to maintain my brain active :) BTW in my previous companies (banks) we were using banking software running on AS/400 (and DB2) and interfacing from IIS/SQL Server via OLEDB for querying the data / executing stored procedures. Actually the service was hosted, but I'm quite sure the AS/400 developers were taking 1/10 of that amount... ;)
Pfiffer 12y ago
If anyone is looking for some good discussion about mainframes, there was a lot of good content that came out in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4446880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4446880
opless 12y ago
I wonder how long it will take for someone to get QSYSOPR privs and invoke pwrdwnsys *immed ?
rzkh 12y ago
RZKH welcomes all friends and people interested in AS400. It's always the same situation - when they come from the unixoid world - they are confused. But you should stay on the path and learn some bit about AS400 (or IBM i as they are called now). It's the only commercially used 128Bit operating system with high level security and low level problems :) Have fun, Holger

73 points by omnibrain 12y ago

If you're into operating systems design I defiantly recommend buying and reading through http://www.amazon.com/Fortress-Rochester-Inside-Story-iSeries/dp/1583040838 http://www.amazon.com/Fortress-Rochester-Inside-Story-iSerie.... The i OS is very different than UNIX and this book was quite enlightening to me. Some of the stuff done is quite visionary. The hardware micro-architecture has fundamentally changed four times, but the upper OS and users doesn't care.

peterfirefly 12y ago
Really, in spite of everything?
- bdg 12y ago
  Care to add some substance to your question?
  - beagle3 12y ago
    That was his way to say " you meant definitely but wrote defiantly "
twoodfin 12y ago
That looks great, too bad it's currently $80 used! I really enjoyed Soltis' more formal "Inside the AS/400"[1], available for a mere 77¢! [1] http://smile.amazon.com/Inside-AS-400-Frank-Soltis/dp/1882419669/ http://smile.amazon.com/Inside-AS-400-Frank-Soltis/dp/188241...
- kps 12y ago
  According to one of the reviews, it's the same book.
- jgalt212 12y ago
  This is the second edition.

cake 12y ago

Wow no idea why someone would need that, I have to work with an AS/400 and let me tell you it's no fun !

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
lotsofcows 12y ago
I worked on AS/400 for quite a while. Really enjoyed it. Updating old RPG terminal based code to Java web based stuff was interesting. Simple CRUD interfaces port easily. And once you're running Java stuff on OS/400 it's also easy to port to the linux environment. And from there is just an argument over databases to bye-bye proprietary hardware.
- cake 12y ago
  That's my experience too, it's mostly basic CRUD interfaces. People say it's fast but that's because it gives you the most barebones user-hostile interface you could have. The company paid IBM $100k to upgrade a single server and this shit is locked with licences for cores and memory. It's not even that fast. The problem is they are too deep in it now but this shit needs to die.

NicoJuicy 12y ago

Ugh, i remember working on an AS 400 at school. I hated that and if i'm not mistaking, there wasn't support no more, when we had to learn it :-s I suppose those jobs earn well (think of AS 400 as watching the Matrix in code (black screen, green letters) and Neo is losing the fight )

colanderman 12y ago
No, they don't, because it's a buyer's market. (My dad is an AS/400 programmer. There's a lot of competition and not much work.)
- whattssonn 12y ago
  It depends. If you have only traditional RPG/400 etc experience there are 10 programmers for each job, yes. But, in this marketplace, if you have experience with (traditional) RPG but also modern techniques like OO, Java, etc, you have lots of work for the coming decennia i assure you. These systems don't disappear, but they do have to be "modernized" and refitted to accommodate the changing environment. There is demand for it, but business do not know it's a modern system for which you can build modern software. The traditional RPG programmer will say something like "well XML and web services etc is too difficult, let's just use CSV and FTP like always". These days it's called "IBM i" and you can do about anything with it, there's even a port of node.js for example. It also has a binary compatible AIX subsystem which integrates with the rest. You can even call it (from a programmer's standpoint) - and it officially is - a UNIX system (POSIX compliant that is). Etc. When you see a green screen you see old software, not an old system that only supports green screens. And there are still more than 100.000 individual customers/companies using this system. And lots and lots of old RPG code, which only grows.

kokey 12y ago

Excellent, now I have somewhere to try out tetris for the AS/400

welly 12y ago

So, 2048 on AS/400?

ljosa 12y ago

Can someone give a guided tour to something cool that shows how different AS/400 is from a Unix machine?

mschaef 12y ago
One of the more unique aspects of the AS/400 is the single level store. I haven't ever used it, but the general idea is that it does away with the file system in exchange for a single, flat address space. This simplifies the programming model. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-level_store http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-level_store The AS/400 also runs something like bytecode, rather than directly on the hardware. This has given IBM the flexibility to change the underlying architecture in fairly radical ways. (new CPU ISAs, etc.) Historically, the AS/400 has some significance to IBM beyond the fact that it's been a commercial success. After IBM did so well with the System/360, they started work on the next big thing: IBM Future System. The idea was that FS was something only IBM could do, because only IBM had the research budget and staff to pull it off. As these things often go, FS didn't achieve its grander goals, but it did spin off several technologies that IBM did commercialize. In addition to several System/370 processors, the Future System work also ultimately resulted in the AS/400.
- scholia 12y ago
  To be specific, the IBM Future System project was a failure, but the System/38 was one of the outcomes. Later the S/38 was renamed AS/400.
  - kps 12y ago
    AS/400 descended from S/38, but is not the same. In particular the System/38 architecture had capability-based addressing¹ — essentially, you can perform a particular kind of access if and only if your pointer contains the necessary permission. ¹Levy, Henry M. (1984). Capability-based computer systems. http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/index.html http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/index.html Chapter 8 covers the IBM System/38.

morganvachon 12y ago

Well this brings back memories. I took an AS/400 class in college (local tech school) since that was the only way to learn SQL back then; none of the other CIS classes offered database programming. The class was geared towards prepping the student for working at one of two companies in the area that hired AS/400 programmers, so it was very narrowly focused to their needs. I have to say, that was a simultaneously challenging and frustrating experience. It soured me on being a programmer of any sort, and I ended up shifting to network administration as a field of study. I'm glad I did. All that said, this seems like a generous and handy service for those who need it.

bdg 12y ago

I'm happy to see this. I'm only in my 20s so I haven't grown up with mainframe computing in my life, but I did get to use both an AS/400 and z/OS about 5 years ago. I've been tweeting and emailing into the dark asking IBM to just provide a free VM of one of these so I can at least play around and learn about them more. I was just getting into assembly on one when I lost access.

craigching 12y ago
You mean like this? http://www.hercules-390.org/ http://www.hercules-390.org/ EDIT: Sorry, that's a link to an OS/390 VM, not AS/400. That was how I originally read your post, that you wanted a z/OS VM to play with. But, it's a useful link nonetheless ;)
Alupis 12y ago
Having had the privilege of working with 2 different AS/400 systems (one a v4 and another a v6), I can say these guys are really bullet proof. Rarely are the OS level issues -- almost all of our issues have been hardware (hdd's failing, not surprising though), or our vendor app messing up (too frequent to be happy about, but hey, it's written in RPG V, so can't complain too much). The problem with learning to work with an AS/400 system is that they are ludicrously expensive to get your hands on -- So I am very glad to see something like this out there in the wild.

mikelbring 12y ago

We used one of these at my old job, well the IMB iSeries but the database was started in the early 80s. Fun times, all the employees where still on green screen when I was there (2011-2012). We started to move everyone to a web application that accessed the AS/400 data.

jdalton 12y ago

The company I work for still uses an AS/400. I hate it.

ceejayoz 12y ago
I spent about a week as an AS/400 operator in-training (they hired me for an available IT position while they worked on getting the real position created). Training was basically a list of "press 3 at 10pm; press Z at 10:02pm; wait 15 minutes".

drakaal 12y ago

There is still great pay if you are an AS/400 guru. About 3 years ago I interviewed for a job where I would be maintaining code which was running on an AS/400 running in System 36 emulation mode. The code had been certified by the government for a 50 year contract. The 3 previous employees had all died. Which didn't make me anxious to take the job, but the pay was $450k a year. And with job security through 2030 it had some appeal. But what do you do after? "I have experience with 50 year old software" is kind of like the resumes people send me saying they know Office XP and Word Perfect. Sure if you can fix the things nobody else can you can charge top dollar, but eventually the last of those things come out of service.

dodders 12y ago
In 2006, Gartner estimated there were still 180 billion lines of COBOL code running in production [1]. I don't believe a significant proportion will have been retired since. Languages never die - they just keep running... [1] http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9004821/Cobol_The_New_Latin http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9004821/Cobol_The_New...
- drakaal 12y ago
  RPG has a significantly lower install base, and I would say it is mostly dead.
Ecio78 12y ago
Do you really need to do something "after" if you earn 450k$/yr for few years? In an ideal work I'll probably take that job, ask for 80% part-time and use the remaining 20% of the time to maintain my brain active :) BTW in my previous companies (banks) we were using banking software running on AS/400 (and DB2) and interfacing from IIS/SQL Server via OLEDB for querying the data / executing stored procedures. Actually the service was hosted, but I'm quite sure the AS/400 developers were taking 1/10 of that amount... ;)

Pfiffer 12y ago

If anyone is looking for some good discussion about mainframes, there was a lot of good content that came out in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4446880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4446880

opless 12y ago

I wonder how long it will take for someone to get QSYSOPR privs and invoke pwrdwnsys *immed ?

rzkh 12y ago

RZKH welcomes all friends and people interested in AS400. It's always the same situation - when they come from the unixoid world - they are confused. But you should stay on the path and learn some bit about AS400 (or IBM i as they are called now). It's the only commercially used 128Bit operating system with high level security and low level problems :) Have fun, Holger