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Every IBM AS/400 (and its predecessors S/36, S/38) came with all the manuals which took up more than one book shelf (IIRC back in the day this made IBM the larg
by gtrubetskoy 11y ago
Every IBM AS/400 (and its predecessors S/36, S/38) came with all the manuals which took up more than one book shelf (IIRC back in the day this made IBM the largest publisher in the world). In high school I had this minimal wage office job where my responsibilities were not entirely clear, but I spent a lot of time reading those manuals, especially the "Structured Query Language/400" and RPG IV, and eventually negotiated a programming job because I was able to completely automate the tasks I was given.
Thinking back, I think those "systems" (as IBM referred to them) were pretty cool. You could upgrade any part of it, including the central processing units without taking it down, which is pretty remarkable even today. As I recall a "reboot" was referred to as IPL (Initial Program Load) and you only did those when IBM said it was necessary - those things never crashed.
- justincormack 11y agoWhich is why IBM created SGML which led to XML and then HTML...
- antaviana 11y agoI was localizing for IBM back in the time. Actually the breakthrough for reduction in publication costs for IBM was the introductin of GML (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Generalized_Markup_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Generalized_Markup_Languag...), the predecessor for SGML.
- wglb 11y agoActually, IBM didn't "invent" SGML, they participated. GML, which was invented by IBM in the person of Charles Goldfarb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Goldfarb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Goldfarb, was a major influence in SGML. And HTML came before XML.
- walterbell 11y agoWhat does IBM use internally for publishing nowadays?
- antaviana 11y agoThey use SGML and DITA.
- arethuza 11y agoReminds me of happy times getting deliveries of Sun workstations to our lab in the early 1990s - they would come with vast amounts of documentation. The only catch was that you had to put it all into the ring binders by yourself! Another nice thing was getting copies of the Adobe PostScript books (I think we got all 3 of the Red, Blue and Green books) - these came with OpenWindows for NeWS.
- linker3000 11y agoVAX manuals - rows of orange folders everywhere!!!
- unics 11y agoAll I remember on our S/36 were the first chapters of each manual. "How to read this manual". And amazingly, those 20 some pages were needed. At least for me they were. As far as IPL's I can't remember a more breathtaking moment when I had to IPL the system and it would come up successfully. And the more horrific event when the 10" floppy used to IPL went bad. LOL, good times.......